Simulink

Tutorial - Using Xilinx System Generator 10.1 for Co-Simulation on Sparatan 3E Starter Board
Ahmed Elhossini January 24, 2010

1

Introduction

Xilinx System Generator Provides a set of Simulink blocks (models) for several hardware operations that could be implemented on various Xilinx FPGAs. These blocks can be used to simulate the functionality of the hardware system using Simulink environmet. The nature of most DSP applications requires floating point format for data representation. While this is easy to implement on several computer systems running high level modeling software such as Simulink, it is more challenging in the hardware world due to the complexity of the implementation of floating point arithmetic. These challenges increase with portable DSP systems where more restricting constraints are applied to the system design. For these reasons Xilinx System Generator uses fixed point format to represent all numerical values in the system. System generator provides some blocks to transform data provided from the software side of the simulation environment (in our case it is Simulink) and the hardware side (System Generator blocks). This is an important concept to understand during the design process using Xilinx System Generator.

1.1

Objectives

This tutorial will demonstrate the process of creating a simple DSP system using Xilinx System Generator 10.1. The System Generator runs within the Simulink simulation environment which is part of MATLAB mathematical package. In this tutorial a simple DSP system will be simulated using Simulink and then a co-simulation is performed using Spartan 3E Starter Board. Co-simulation integrates Simulink simulation capabilities with a hardware implementation to verify the functionality of the system. The following steps are described in this tutorial: • Starting System Generator with MATLAB. • Creating a DSP system using Simulink and System Generator. • Simulating the DSP system using Simulink. • Preparing System Generator