Communications System Design: Key Success Factors

           

Communications system design is aided most by early and frequent verification of system-level performance at every phase of the baseband and RF design cycles.

Baseband design progresses from MATLAB® or C-code algorithms to floating or fixed-point, Verilog or VHDL, to hardware testing. RF design moves from behavioral models to circuit designs to hardware testing.

Verification of system-level performance at each stage in the design process can identify potential baseband/RF integration issues early - when the impact of design changes is least on development costs and schedule.

Agilent Ptolemy, the system simulator in Agilent's Advanced Design System (ADS), enables both baseband and RF designs to be verified together, at every phase of a product development cycle to help minimize system integration risk.

Advanced Design System also offers:

• Accurate baseband and RF behavioral models to enable and accelerate top-down design.   » details
• Wireless Libraries for leading signal formats including WiMax, Wimedia, LTE, and many others, to verify both baseband algorithm and RF design performance.   » details
• Preconfigured antenna and propagation model sets, eliminating the need to write custom models.   » details
• Common measurement algorithms between simulation and instrumentation, to reduce unwanted surprises when transitioning from the simulation phase to the hardware testing phase.   » demo
• Connected Solutions, which integrates simulation and instrumentation to verify system performance even before all the hardware is available.   » details

SystemVue is another attractive solution, offering a system-level design environment for development, simulation and analysis.

SystemVue has an intuitive block level design interface with extensive model libraries of modulation standards, adaptive control elements, and digital signal processing components. SystemVue analysis is bit- and distortion-true. Results can be output as C code for a DSP processor or as HDL code for an FPGA.   » details

Leading companies from 3Com to TRW use SystemVue to design, develop and test:

• End-to-end communications systems.
• Bit-true DSP systems.
• Distortion-true RF/analog systems.
• Signal processing systems.