What Is VFS? - What Is VFS? - 2026.1 English - UG1864

Vitis™ Functional Simulation (VFS) lets you exercise hardware-oriented designs such as HLS kernels and AIE graphs from high-level languages (Python®, MATLAB®) without running a full hardware build.

VFS focuses on functional correctness, not cycle-accurate performance. You use it to do the following:

• Validate algorithms against hardware data types (fixed-point, complex fixed-point, microscaling) before committing to synthesis.
• Build end-to-end reference models that mix multiple components (for example, an RF front end feeding an HLS preprocessing kernel and an AIE graph).
• Drive regression tests from Python / MATLAB so that software and hardware teams share a single source of truth.