Articles
Meeting The Demand For Complex Communications Design
May 7, 2010
•Technical Article: Meeting The Demand For Complex Communications Design
By Jon Friedman, The MathWorks
Reprinted with permission from NASA Tech Briefs Vol. 34, No. 4, pp.14-15.
Communications engineers today must design to accommodate changing missions, shorter product lifecycles, and increasing computer power. As a result, they create hybrid systems that include RF, high-speed signal processing, lower-speed signal processing, and controls logic and control systems.
In the initial stages of the design process, it is often unclear whether to use analog or digital components, and what portion of a design should be implemented in software or hardware. System designers and implementers make their best guess on how to partition the design, which might result in sub-optimal designs and system performance. Typically, it is only near the end of the design process that the system designers and implementers can know whether their initial guess meets system performance requirements. If it doesn't, significant rework needs to be done, which leads to cost and time overruns on the project. To address these challenges earlier in the design process, communications engineers have adopted Model-Based Design.
With Model-Based Design, engineers develop an executable model, often referred to as an executable specification, which is independent of the implementation. Within this model, design and system engineers can develop, test, and partition the design prior to implementation and integration. This approach enables them to find errors early in the process, when errors are easier and less expensive to fix.
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