Model-Based Design
Jon Friedman is Director of Marketing for Aerospace and Defense, The MathWorks
Today, communications engineers must create designs that can accommodate changing missions, shorter product life cycles, and the increasing power of computers. As a result, engineers create hybrid systems that include radio frequency, high-speed signal processing, slow-speed signal processing, and control and control logic systems. In the early stages of the design process, it is often unclear whether analog or digital components should be used and what portion of a design should be implemented in software or hardware. Those responsible for designing and implementing systems must make guesses about how to split the design, which could lead to sub-optimal designs and lower system performance. Typically, it is only near the end of the design process that systems designers and implementers can tell whether their initial guesses meet the systems performance requirements. If they don't meet them, they have to redo a significant amount of work, which causes costs and delays in the project. To address these issues earlier in the design process, communications engineers have embraced model-based design.
