1. A system for designing and emulating a user design, comprising: (i) a system controller comprising: (a) an interface to a user workstation; and (b) a data communication interface; and (ii) an emulation platform coupled to the data communication interface, comprising: (a) a plurality of field programmable logic devices for implementing the user design and third party IPs; and (b) an interface to a target system with which the user design interacts at run time.