FPGA Simulation - does it need FPGA hardware?

Reading through Altera documentation on FPGA programming, I can see that the design flow is made of

Design -> Compilation -> Simulation -> Programmation -> HW Verification

The design consists of writing Acceleration function units and using IP to build a circuit in schematics, e.g. using Quartus. The design is then compiled. Simulation is made of functional and timing simulation. Functional simulation verifies that the design corresponds to the functionality we want, while timing simulation is to verify the impact of the propagation delay. Only on the programming phase, the file generated at compilation is loaded onto the FPGA and run on hardware for HW verification.

I infer from this that the simulation phase does not need Hardware. Is it correct? Also, the doc mentions the waveform simulation platform for timing simulation. Are there other tools for timing simulation and what are tools for functional simulation?

Answer

Simulation tools in this software are a pure digital simulation of the code you have written. No you do not need hardware, and generally it is abstracted completely from the chosen hardware. There are a few intricacies in this such as needing to set defaults on simulated signals and to simulate a clock, This is generally done in something like modelsim, which you could open your code in.