Last week, I had an opportunity to participate in the Simulink World Tour, hosted by Mathworks. I was attracted by the agenda of showing all different applications of Simulink. Personally, I have been fascinated by the easy and intuitive way to build a system and solve for the solution. That’s the way mathematic should be – to help people visualize and construct the problem. The actual mechanics of solving for the mathematic solutions is less than interesting, at least for me.

In the morning session, they showed off a bunch of stateflow, design verifiers modules, VHDL code generation, which are good for logic verification. They also added PolySpace to check for code correctness.

What stood out for me are the embedded Matlab C code, which are great to speed up execution speed once it’s compiled. The image processing demo in the video surveillance application was quite interesting. I didn’t know the execution speed could be fast enough to do that. They also showed a hybrid car’s electro-mechanical system built with simulink and how the gas mileage fluctuated when the gas peddle is floored. This demonstrated how the system modules can be built and simulated when the interface behavior are properly modeled.

During the buffet lunch, I observed that most of the participants came from the defense industry. They probably deal with system simulations a lot due to the analog/RF nature and the interactions between electrical and mechanical systems. I can see how powerful simulink can be if put to good use. I would like to play with simulink but haven’t seen a good fit for my line of work, where things tend to be mostly digital. The analog-digital interface has been largely shielded by the chipsets. I’m still looking…