Model Based Design Methodology Applied to Software Defined Radio based EW Receiver

With the technology advance in analog-to-digital converter (ADC) and digital-to-analog converter (DAC) devices, associated with high speed digital signal processing (DSP) using field-programmable gate arrays (FPGA), modern Electronic Warfare Receiver (EWR) systems design have moved toward digital implementation applying software-defined radio (SDR). In this context, Model Based Design (MBD) emerges as a development methodology to integrate high-level system simulation, automatic hardware description generation, and hardware-inthe-loop (HIL) testing. This paper proposes a concept demonstration of the MBD methodology applied to an Electronic Warfare (EW) radio frequency (RF) recorder triggered by pulse envelope. MATLAB/Simulink models are initially used to simulate the system at a high level. Subsequently, the Xilinx System Generator tool generates and transfers the hardware description to a Xilinx FPGA. Finally, the hardware implementation is validated using HIL technique. Comparative measures between the simulationonly and hardware-in-the-loop versions are presented.