Communications

Engineering Tasks

• System Architecture
• Baseband Signal Processing
• Analog and Mixed-Signal Design
• Control Logic Design
• Advanced Technology Research
• Optical Networking Design

Analog and Mixed-Signal Design

All communication systems, even those with digital techniques, touch an analog physical medium - a copper cable, an optical fiber, or an antenna. Typical analog/mixed-signal circuit components used in communication systems include:

• amplifiers
• filters
• mixers
• oscillators
• analog-to-digital converters
• digital-to-analog converters
• frequency synthesizers.

These analog/mixed-signal designs are typically modeled and simulated either at the behavioral or the circuit level. In Simulink®, analog behavior is captured in terms of the fundamental ordinary differential equations, making it easy to change requirements and parameters in a model. Additionally, Simulink software is unique as a multi-domain simulation engine that enables you to incorporate hybrid systems (analog/mixed-signal and digital).

Accelerate Designs Through Behavioral Models

Component-level analog/mixed-signal simulations tools require engineers to design and simulate at the resistor, capacitor, and transistor circuit level before they can characterize the behavior of their designs. Capturing a design at that level of detail early in the project can be inefficient, in part due to the slow nature of simulating at the circuit level. With the Simulink family of products, engineers can quickly develop accurate behavior models of their analog/mixed-signal designs using high-level blocks. Engineers are then able to run fast simulations over a range of parameters, to analyze and optimize their design by quickly exploring different design trade offs. As a result, the characteristics of their specifications are significantly improved before beginning the low-level circuit development stage.

Testing and Validation

Communications engineers can also use MATLAB® and Simulink environments to build test harness for the analog/mixed-signal device under study. The test harness can model other analog circuitry, an analog channel, digital algorithms, or a mixture. By comparing the lower-level designs to the original specification or golden reference model, communications engineers can reduce the variance between the design and the final product.

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