September 13, 2011 -- Continuity in the design flow is becoming critical if engineers are to meet tighter budget and time constraints when developing next generation signal processing and communications systems. Traditionally, system engineers, algorithm developers and hardware engineers use different tools, which can introduce gaps in the workflow. However, with Model-Based Design, engineers use a common set of models in an extensible environment to define requirements, develop algorithms, implement or target hardware and test and verify their designs.

With Model-Based Design, system engineers can model the behaviour of digital, analog and RF components and perform design trade-offs in simulation, which can be difficult or impossible using paper based design reviews. Algorithm developers can then reuse and elaborate the same models to build and test more detailed designs.

Later in the development process, these models can become the design artifacts from which hardware engineers generate HDL code. At that time, system-level models and tests can be reused as a testbench to validate the performance of the HDL implementation and the final hardware against the model-level results.

By Joy Lin. (Lin is with MathWorks, Ltd.)