MathWorks Announces Release 2010b of MATLAB and Simulink Products

By DE Editors

A 3D isosurface MATLAB plot revealing the geodesic dome structure of a carbon-60 fullerene molecule. Image courtesy of the MathWorks.

MathWorks has announced Release 2010b of its MATLAB and Simulink product families. The expanded set of tools and features in this release include new communications system design capabilities in MATLAB, automated PID controls tuning, GigE Vision hardware standard support, and enhanced Simulink and Stateflow support for creating reusable models.

R2010b also introduces SimRF, which adds system-level modeling of RF receiver architectures. This release updates 84 MathWorks products, including Polyspace code verification products.

Updates to MATLAB that support advanced programming include custom enumerated data types, 64-bit integer arithmetic, and a number of enhancements to the development environment.

Other MATLAB family highlights in R2010b include:

• Parallel Computing Toolbox: GPU support of CUDA-enabled NVIDIA hardware for accelerated computation
• Control System Toolbox: New commands and graphical tools for modeling and automatically tuning PID controllers
• Image Acquisition Toolbox: Plug-and-play camera input using the GigE Vision hardware standard
• Communications Blockset: New System objects for communications system design in MATLAB
• Fixed-Income Toolbox: New pricing and valuation functions for mortgage pools and credit default swap agreements

With R2010b, Simulink offers a new signal type and subsystem enhancements that the company says help reduce block counts, simulation time, and memory usage for large models. New capabilities for capturing design variants and configurations in Simulink and creating reusable state charts in Stateflow can help teams manage design alternatives and reuse large, complex system models.

The Parallel Computing Toolbox lets users divide this sample MATLAB application, plotting the performance of five equalizers, into several tasks, each of which performs the same calculation for different signal-to-noise ratios and is executed on a remote worker. Image courtesy of the MathWorks.

Other Simulink family highlights in R2010b include Simulink HDL Coder, which includes:

• New FPGA Workflow Advisor for critical path analysis and automated implementation on Xilinx and Altera FPGAs
• Area-speed optimizations that include resource sharing, streaming, and distributed pipelining
• Support for 42 blocks in Communications Blockset and Signal Processing Blockset
• Support for the DO-254 standard

Simulink Verification and Validation enables test-harness generation, data logging, and test execution API for analyzing model subsystems and for automating component testing during simulation and code verification (requires Real-Time Workshop Embedded Coder).

SimRF is a new circuit-envelope and harmonic balance simulation technology built on the Simscape platform for modeling RF system architectures.

The new release also includes Polyspace Server for C/C++ and Polyspace Server for Ada, which are Web interfaces for viewing project metrics.

For more information, visit MathWorks.

Go here for the MATLAB landing page.

Go here for the Simulink landing page.

Click here to access MATLAB video and webinars.

See a list of the new features in MATLAB 7.11 2010b.

See why DE's Editor selected Release 2010b of MATLAB and Simulink as their Pick of the Week.