A system for emulating a circuit design is presented. The system includes a host workstation coupled by an emulation interface to a field programmable gate array (FPGA) configured to emulate and verify the circuit design when the host workstation is invoked to verify the circuit design. The emulation interface is configured to provide timing and control information for at least the verify. The system further includes a non-transitory computer readable storage medium including instructions, which when executed cause a computer to compile a portion of the circuit design and an associated verification module adapted to configure the FPGA. A compilation is performed in accordance with a description file.