Xilinx V2.1 - Manual (Page 10)

10 Xilinx Development System
Xilinx System Generator v2.1 Reference Guide
3 and simply use floating point operations in hardware. The answer is that most
operations have a sufficiently small dynamic range that a fixed point representation is
acceptable, and the hardware realization of fixed point is considerably cheaper.
The System Generator Design Flow
Simulink provides a graphical environment for creating and modeling dynamical
systems. System Generator consists of a Simulink library called the Xilinx Blockset,
and software to translate a Simulink model into a hardware realization of the model.
System Generator maps system parameters defined in Simulink (e.g. as mask
variables in Xilinx Blockset blocks), into entities and architectures, ports, signals, and
attributes in a hardware realization. In addition, System Generator automatically
produces command files for FPGA synthesis, HDL simulation, and implementation
tools, so that the user can work entirely in graphical environments in going from
system specification to hardware realization.