Can FPGAs be emulated on a CPU?
They can be simulated, but not in real time. There's no way that a sequential computer can truly emulate the parallelism going on in most FPGA designs.

Of course, there are exceptions &mdash; the FPGA design could be a general-purpose computer!



In theory, a GPU could be used to make a simulation run faster, but in fact, the kinds of things that GPUs can accelerate are not a good match for general-purpose logic simulation, so as far as I know, no one has put any significant effort into making it work robustly. Instead, advanced simulators take advantage of multiple CPU threads when they are available. Still nowhere near real-time, however.