MathWorks adds capabilities for MATLAB and Simulink

MathWorks has announced strengthened support for wireless communications and radar design with MATLAB and Simulink. Release 2013a (R2013a) enhancements to Phased Array System Toolbox and SimRF now enable wireless communications and radar system designers to speed up modelling and simulation within the MATLAB and Simulink environments.

Phased Array System Toolbox helps users to model an end-to-end phased array system, or process acquired radar data, by using new capabilities for polarisation, array perturbations and broadband arrays. SimRF includes a new circuit envelope solver to accelerate simulation and model load time; it also expands its library of components for the simulation of RF front ends at the system level.

These enhancements help radar and communications system designers to model increasingly complex scenarios with greater accuracy and performance.

The major update to Phased Array System Toolbox includes monostatic and multistatic radar system modelling, including point targets, free-space propagation, surface clutter and barrage jammer to help estimate maximum range, peak power and SNR of a radar system. It also enables modelling of sensor arrays and subarrays with arbitrary geometries for beam pattern analysis of linear, planar and conformal sensor arrays; polarisation and platform motion specification for arrays and targets; and GPU support to accelerate clutter modelling.

Key enhancements to SimRF include faster circuit envelope simulation of multiple carrier-frequency models for arbitrary architectures. Combined with equivalent baseband technology for discrete-time simulation of single-carrier cascaded systems, this enables rapid RF modelling and simulation at the system level.

The SimRF enhancements also bring reduced simulation start-up time and easier set-up of circuit envelope simulation with enhanced configuration block, including unlimited number of simulation frequencies and automatic selection of fundamental tones. Also included are new models for active and passive components (amplifier, mixer, LC ladder, transformer, noise), and custom SimRF model authoring using the Simscape language.