Digital, RF, and Antenna Design

Jointly optimize digital, RF, and antenna components of wireless communications systems

MATLAB® and Simulink® help you optimize your end-to-end wireless system designs from antenna to bits. Explore system architectures by integrating digital baseband, RF, and antenna components in the same model. Evaluate design tradeoffs and analyze the performance impact of design choices. Test each component while ensuring that overall system performance requirements are met.

With MATLAB and Simulink, you can:

  • Integrate digital baseband components, including transmitter, channel models, RF impairments, and receiver algorithms, into your system model
  • Generate test waveforms with the Wireless Waveform Generator app
  • Configure and analyze RF transceivers in terms of noise, power, and nonlinearity using the RF Budget Analyzer app
  • Design RF architectures, generate RF behavioral models, and analyze harmonic and intermodulation performance with multi-carrier frequency simulations
  • Design antennas and antenna arrays to integrate MIMO architectures
  • Develop spatial signal processing algorithms, including beamforming, to improve and minimize interference

Why Use Digital, RF, and Antenna Design?

MIMO System Design

Model and simulate MIMO wireless systems. Explore design tradeoffs in massive MIMO, hybrid beamforming, MU-MIMO, mmWave, and ray tracing systems.

3 D gain pattern of an antenna array designed for beamforming.

Beamforming

Model efficiency and gains of beamforming techniques. Integrate beamforming algorithms. Partition beamforming between the RF and baseband domains.

Illustration of spectrum allocation used in 5 G systems, including m m wave frequencies at 2 8 and 3 9 G H z.

Millimeter-Wave Designs

Model and simulate high-frequency large-bandwidth mmwave systems. Compensate for the effects of impedance mismatches, losses, and leakage.

Illustration shows a block diagram of a simple wireless transceiver, including an R F front-end and a digital baseband component.

RF Transceiver and Front-End Design

Design high-performance and low-cost RF transceivers. Integrate digital baseband, RF front-end, and antenna array components. Test, measure, and optimize performance across multiple center frequencies and bandwidths and account for impedance mismatches, noise, and nonlinearity effects.

Plotting the input and output profile in a power amplifier comparing the estimated and actual gains.

Power Amplifier Modeling and Digital Pre-Distortion

Design power-efficient and ultra-linear RF transmitters. Develop behavioral models of Power Amplifier (PA), including nonlinearity and memory effects. Apply adaptive linearization algorithms, including Digital Pre-Distortion (DPD), to mitigate the nonlinear behavior and improve the performance of the PA.

Visualizing the directivity, gain, and realized gain patterns of an antenna array.

Antenna and Antenna Array Design

Design and analyze physical antenna elements and arrays. Model pre-built antennas and develop custom antennas. Optimize antenna  performance and integrate the effect of the designed antenna on larger RF transceiver systems.