Engineers at Harman Becker Automotive Systems are developing the next generation of automotive audio and video systems using orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM), a multicarrier modulation scheme for wideband digital communications. Their goal is to implement multiple digital broadcast standards like Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB) and Digital Radio Mondiale (DRM) on a single device.
Harman Becker engineers use MathWorks tools for Model-Based Design to model and simulate receiver baseband algorithms, estimate bit error rate (BER) performance, verify initial designs, and enable teams working in different domains to collaborate. Previously, design verification required more costly and time-consuming approaches, including extensive C programming and hardware prototypes–approaches that uncovered problems late in the design cycle, if at all.
“The bit error rate is the receiver performance measure that distinguishes our products,” explains Axel Westenweller, senior development engineer, signal processing, at Harman Becker. “By modeling, simulating, and verifying our design in Simulink, we were able to get an accurate, rapid assessment of the system's BER, enabling us to make key design decisions very early on.”