You can, verilator https://www.veripool.org/wiki/verilator https://www.veripool.org/wiki/verilator is a free and very performant way of doing so. It's not that

You can, verilator https://www.veripool.org/wiki/verilator https://www.veripool.org/wiki/verilator is a free and very performant way of doing so. It's not that hard to get into. SwerV https://github.com/westerndigitalcorporation/swerv_eh1 https://github.com/westerndigitalcorporation/swerv_eh1 uses it and Chisel uses it as a backend.