Short Course: Moving from Prototyping to Production

There is a significant gap between the concept of a wireless system and the realization of that working design. Bridging this gap typically involves teams of engineers with a variety of different skill sets (such as RF, SW, DSP, HDL, and embedded Linux®), and in many cases projects get derailed early in the development stage because of the difficulty in coordinating the efforts of these varied design entities. Over the next hour, we will examine the advances in platforms and tools that allow developers to quickly simulate and prototype wireless systems while establishing and maintaining a deployable path to production. As a real-world example of the process, we will prototype a wireless SDR platform that receives and decodes QPSK signals. The resources required in this case are MATLAB® and Simulink and the skills to integrate and embed hardware/software. The hardware platform will be the Analog Devices/Xilinx/Avnet PicoZed SDR system, which uses the ADI RadioVerse AD9361, and the Xilinx Zynq 7035 All Programmable SoC. A demo of MATLAB and Simulink® performing the following tasks will be performed:

  • Design of signal processing algorithms used to decode QPSK messages
  • Simulation of the RF transceiver receiving QPSKsignals
  • Generation of C and HDL code
  • Verification of the HDL code with recorded and live data on the target transceiver and FPGA, tethered and untethered from a PC.


  • Robin Getz (Engineer), Analog Devices
  • Noam Levine (Engineer), MathWorks