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News and New Products
Software targets communications design
By Jeff Berman -- EDN, 6/30/2005
The MathWorks recently rolled out Communications Blockset 3, an upgraded version of a software program that offers engineers added functions for designing and simulating the physical layer of communications systems and components for wireless and wire-line systems using model-based design. The new version, which includes channel visualization and bit-error-rate-analysis functions, lets users exchange and share executable specifications throughout the modeling and simulation process. These functions allow designers to view various channel-mode-domain behaviors, such as time, frequency, and phasor, to design communications receivers and to compare simulation results to benchmarks in a GUI setting.
Colin Warwick, the MathWorks’ communications products manager, says that Communications Blockset 3 helps improve communications-product design. “Communications products are becoming more computationally intensive than they were in the old days when engineers and designers relied on paper-based models, which were time-consuming and made it hard to ‘tease out’ design errors with Spice error codes and netlists,” says Warwick.
Using model-based design provides a working model of a communications-product design in a test environment to specify a product’s behavior before a designer configures the part in hardware or software. “[Engineers and designers] want to focus on building products, not channel models,” says Warwick. “This platform prebuilds a wireless channel, letting people focusing on building equalizers and similar products to overcome channel impairments.” Designing wireless channels is more challenging than building wire-line ones, due to communications products and devices that must adapt to changing landscapes, conditions, and speeds.
The channel-visualization features are particularly helpful for receiver designers, because it lets them fix damage that changing conditions cause, says Mike McLernon, the MathWorks’ senior team leader for communications development. “When collecting data, channel visualization lets users focus on specific channel characteristics, rather than signal characteristics, such as spreading, 802.11a, or MOFDM [multilevel-orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing]. This tool can slice into a time or a phasor domain and look at channels at different angles to build receivers that combat the effects of signal characteristics,” he says.
The bit-error-rate function lets users working at the physical layer of a design to check test bench results against their own work to see where their results should be and how they match up to it. The tool automates comparisons and simulation results, so that they designers can view them in a GUI environment to compare simulations with theory and integrate environments to combine simulation and analysis, which helps gives users a clear indication of when a design is completed by plotting parameters, such as SNR versus bit-error rate.
Communications Blockset 3 also includes a synchronization library, which lets users build receiver models with without writing C code, and model adaptive and nonadaptive algorithms. The Mathworks’ Communications Blockset 3 is now available and costs $1000. The platform runs as part of the company’s flagship applications, Matlab and Simulink.
The MathWorks, www.mathworks.com.
