Using MATLAB^® and Simulink^® for FPGA Design

You can use MATLAB and Simulink in automotive, industrial, avionics, space and defense applications to develop complex algorithms targeting FPGAs. In most cases, you can verify floating- and fixed-point algorithms in MATLAB and Simulink and then follow a traditional design flow and hand code the Hardware Description Language (HDL), including VHSIC HDL (VHDL) and Verilog.

By using MATLAB and Simulink code generation products, including HDL Coder™ and HDL Verifier™, you can accelerate the development of designs that use our FPGAs and complete your work in days or weeks rather than months. HDL Coder and HDL Verifier work with Libero^® SoC Design Suite, a comprehensive, easy-to-learn and easy to adopt development toolset for designing with our FPGAs, and IP to produce target-optimized implementations.

With HDL Coder and HDL Verifier, you can:

•  Model, simulate and explore your algorithms in MATLAB and Simulink
•  Program our FPGAs from MATLAB and Simulink
• Verify your FPGA design against system-level specifications using HDL simulation and FPGA boards

Leveraging MathWorks’ HDL Verification, enabled by our Accelerate Ecosystem, makes our FPGAs well suited for a wide variety of applications within the defense and security markets, including motor control and digital signal processing, military communications, Smart Embedded Vision (SEV) and control systems.

Explore our comprehensive selection of MathWorks solutions that support our PolarFire^® and SmartFusion^® 2 FPGAs. We provide an industry-leading and optimized design environment to accelerate your development journey with these families of FPGAs.   

To execute this workflow, you will require the following software tools:

•  Libero SoC Design Suite v12.0
•  Hardware support package
              o   Hardware support package from MathWorks, or
              o   From within MATLAB Add On > Get Hardware Support Package option

You'll also require the following MathWorks tools:

• MATLAB
• Simulink
• HDL Coder
• HDL Verifier
• Fixed-Point Designer

In addition to the tools previously listed, you will require the following hardware:

• RTG4 FPGA development kit, PolarFire FPGA and SmartFusion 2 SoC FPGA development board
• Ethernet cable
• USB JTAG cable for programming the bit file

The hardware support package automatically integrates the PolarFire FPGA, SmartFusion 2 SoC FPGA and RTG4 FPGA development boards.