Verifying Digital Systems with MATLAB

TL;DR

This paper introduces a MATLAB toolbox that facilitates the verification of fixed-point digital systems by checking for design errors like overflow, stability issues, and quantization effects, using both command-line and graphical interfaces.

Contribution

It presents a new MATLAB toolbox integrated with the Digital-System Verifier for comprehensive verification of digital systems considering finite word-length effects.

Findings

The toolbox effectively detects overflow, limit cycles, and stability issues.

It provides both command-line and GUI for accessible verification.

Demonstrates applicability to real-world digital system verification.

Abstract

A MATLAB toolbox is presented, with the goal of checking occurrences of design errors typically found in fixed-point digital systems, considering finite word-length effects. In particular, the present toolbox works as a front-end to a recently introduced verification tool, known as Digital-System Verifier, and checks overflow, limit cycle, quantization, stability, and minimum phase errors, in digital systems represented by transfer-function and state-space equations. It provides a command-line version, with simplified access to specific functions, and a graphical-user interface, which was developed as a MATLAB application. The resulting toolbox is important for the verification community, since it shows the applicability of verification to real-world systems.