Looking for basic requirements for xilinx system generator and High level synthesis design (HLS) based hardware implementation of a DSP based algorithm.
system generator and HLS both can be integrated with MATLAB and you can have Hardware in loop system. both are giving you different abstraction at higher level specially system generator is based on MATLAB library of xilinx block.
Whereas HLS can give another abstraction of writing code in c/c++ pragmas etc. to write code and implement on fpga without any problem
Xilinx System Generator supports a sufficiently large number of DSP blocks, ranging from simple adders, multipliers etc. to complex blocks such as FFTs, filters and memories, etc. supporting floating-point DSP. It is only limited to Xilinx FPGA products and requires manual conversion of Simulink floating-point numbers to fixed-point, which can be a time consuming and error-prone process.
An automated HLS flow allows custom logic designers to specify design functionality in high level programming languages for both embedded software and customized hardware logic on the SoC.