There are 3 types of builds and runs in Vitis, Software Emulation, Hardware Emulation and System Hardware. Since RTL kernels naturally don’t support software emulation, this tutorial will only demonstrate hardware emulation flow.
In addition to functional correctness, hardware emulation provides a cycle-accurate performance and detailed resource estimates , but the compile and execution times are longer than for software emulation, it is recommended to use small data sets for validation during hardware emulation to keep run times manageable.
In mix-kernel design, hardware emulation has often been used to test system level integration and view the interaction between multiple kernels.