As process nodes shrink and analog-digital integration grows more complex, the cost of late-stage design iterations continues to rise. For semiconductor engineers, the ability to verify architectural decisions early — before RTL is committed — is increasingly a competitive necessity. MATLAB and Simulink provide a unified environment that supports the full IC development cycle, from high-level system modeling through EDA integration and functional verification, enabling teams to adopt a shift-left methodology without disrupting established workflows.

With MATLAB and Simulink, you can:

• Use Model-Based Design to enhance architectural exploration, enable early verification, accelerate the verification process, and reduce development time and costs
• Generate synthesizable RTL code and C/C++, HDL, System C, and IBIS-AMI testbenches and models to accelerate prototyping, implementation, and verification
• Reuse existing MATLAB and Simulink models within Electronic Design Automation (EDA) workflows, leveraging them as golden reference models, stimuli generators, and validated testbenches
• Improve the efficiency of analog and mixed-signal designs with automation, advanced reporting, curve fitting, and AI

Streamline Architectural Exploration

You can use MATLAB to analyze high-level system architectures, such as deciding between a second- or third-ord

er sigma-delta modulator or selecting the best phase-locked loop (PLL) type. As integration and advanced process nodes increase the complexity of analog-digital interactions, you may encounter challenges in system modeling, verification, and noise analysis. MATLAB and Simulink enable you to model analog circuits, digital controllers, FSMs, and DSP elements together, facilitating early what-if analysis and verification. You can reuse these models in EDA flows, promoting a shift-left approach. Products like Mixed-Signal Blockset let you explore the design space and perform static analysis of PLLs, helping you identify the best starting point for your designs. Products like SerDes Toolbox let you model, analyze, and simulate SerDes systems and automatically generate dual PAMn IBIS-AMI models.

Analyze and Optimize Designs

MATLAB and Simulink products let you analyze and optimize mixed-signal IC designs. You can import and analyze large simulation results from Cadence® Virtuoso® ADE Explorer and Assembler with MATLAB, identify data trends, generate reports, and optimize designs. The SerDes Designer app lets you design wired communication links using statistical analysis and explore equalizer configurations to enhance channel performance. You can conduct experiments on multiple parameters, extract design metrics, and visualize waveforms for high-speed links such as DDR5, PCIe, and PAM. Also, you can automate simulations, analyze data, and create visualizations directly from the MATLAB command line.

Integrate with EDA Design Workflows

By generating portable, synthesizable Verilog®, SystemVerilog, and VHDL® code from MATLAB functions, Simulink models, and Stateflow charts, you can conduct early RTL analyses and optimization, including Power-Performance-Area (PPA) assessments. This capability—along with optimizing RTL code for speed and area, highlighting critical paths, and obtaining resource estimates—enables you to shift-left the design and verification cycle. A workflow advisor automates prototyping on AMD®, Altera®, and Microchip boards and generates IP cores for ASIC and FPGA workflows. Traceability ensures code verification for high-integrity applications meeting standards like DO-254.

Start Verification Early

By starting at higher abstraction levels with MATLAB and Simulink, you can develop testbenches and algorithmic models closely aligned with system requirements. SystemVerilog DPI-C models generated from MATLAB and Simulink facilitate building RTL verification environments, such as Universal Verification Methodology (UVM), or test harnesses for SPICE® models. This enables early verification, reusing system-level models validated by the architecture team. Once the design is ready, you can verify your algorithms via cosimulation, with testbenches in MATLAB or Simulink and designs in simulators like Cadence® Xcelium™, AMS, Spectre, Synopsys® VCS®, Siemens® Questa™, or the AMD® Vivado® simulator. This approach can significantly enhance productivity and reduce verification times.

MATLAB and Simulink address the core challenges of modern IC design by bridging system-level modeling and implementation-ready verification. Engineers can explore architectural trade-offs for mixed-signal systems — including PLLs, SerDes links, and sigma-delta modulators — then carry validated models directly into EDA flows as golden references or UVM testbenches. Synthesizable RTL generation in Verilog, SystemVerilog, and VHDL, combined with cosimulation support for Cadence Xcelium, Synopsys VCS, and Siemens Questa, ensures continuity from algorithm to implementation. FPGA prototyping workflows for AMD, Altera, and Microchip platforms further accelerate hardware validation. The result is a cohesive design and verification flow that reduces rework, improves cross-domain collaboration, and compresses time to tapeout.

Featured products

All products mentioned are developed by MathWorks.

• MATLAB and Simulink for Mixed Signal Systems
• Mixed-Signal Analyzer
• Generate and Validate HDL Code for Simscape Model
• Verifying Algorithms on FPGAs and ASICs