Question: does Xilinx support hardware co-simulation over USB?
Answer: Technically, Xilinx doesn’t support HW cosim over USB. However, their ML605, SP601 and SP605 boards all contain proprietary USB-to-JTAG circuitry. So all you need is a straight USB-to-USB cable from your PC to the dev board. Then you run JTAG HW cosim. The drivers take care of the rest. From the outside it looks like USB hwcosim. However, bandwidth is not impressive, but it may be good enough for your purposes.
For any board that does not have the built-in USB-to-JTAG circuit (like the Avnet boards), you can use the Xilinx USB JTAG programming pod. It would accomplish the same thing. This method has the added benefit of allowing a customer to create a hwcosim plugin for their own custom board.
