In reply to Richard Hamer (EnSilica):
There seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding here in the difference between a hardware description language used to simulate a design versus using that same description to implement a design in actual hardware. It’s like drawing a picture of a pinwheel, blowing on that picture, and expecting the pinwheel to start turning.
You can certainly build a 3-D model of that pinwheel, simulate the force of the wind on that model and watch it turn, and then send that model to a 3-d printer to get your pinwheel. I suppose you could put wind sensors in front of your monitor, and write a program that converts a value from the sensor to a value used in the simulation. The point is, the simulator has no knowledge that the value came from someone blowing on the monitor, it just sees a parameter value change.
Unless you are designing the keyboard hardware yourself and simulating that, there really is not much point in taking keyboard input from a computer and using that to stimulate your design in simulation. The operating system has already abstracted away the keyboard hardware and provides you with a string of character codes. The reason you are simulating in the first place is to verify the functionality of your design. If you find a problem, you are going to want to replay the exact same stimulus until you fix your problem.
Just like the pinwheel example, I do know it’s possible for someone to set up a program that reads keyboard input and provides that as stimulus to a simulation. But that involves inter-process communication(IPC) and specific tool knowledge to set that up.