To enable signal integrity engineers to design, model, analyze, and visualize networks of RF components commonly found in high-speed digital electronics, MathWorks has unwrapped RF Toolbox 2. It includes new functions that enable engineers to better model the impedance differences and reflection effects compromising signal distortion that occur with high-speed semiconductor devices connected to backplanes and printed circuit boards (PCBs). By combining the new modeling capabilities of RF Toolbox with the power of model-based design in MATLAB and Simulink, engineers can significantly reduce the time required to develop I/O circuitry for these devices used throughout the aerospace, defense, communications, and automotive industries.

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RF Toolbox eliminates the need for manually building transmission line models from measured data to test I/O circuit designs. Instead, engineers can quickly model transmission lines as rational functions, a type of behavioral model that is faster, more accurate, and provides greater insight into transmission line characteristics than traditional alternatives like inverse fast Fourier transforms (IFFTs), according to the MathWorks. Unlike Toolbox 1, which was introduced in 2004 and works only in frequency domain, version 2 adds time domain capabilities. 

The added capabilities in version 2 of the RF Toolbox complement the product’s existing support for designing, modeling, and analyzing networks of RF components in wireless communications and radar projects. Applying the same workflow, the new version helps engineers design for signal integrity by letting them use network parameters to specify RF filters, transmission lines, amplifiers, and mixers, either directly or by their physical properties. Network parameters can be generated from within MATLAB or read in from external data. When data describing the response of the backplane is imported into RF Toolbox, it generates a rational function model that can be exported as a test environment either into Simulink or directly into a Verilog-A-compatible circuit simulator from an EDA vendor. RF Toolbox also provides Smith charts and rectangular and polar plots for visualizing data.

RF Toolbox 2 is available immediately for the Microsoft Windows, including Vista, UNIX, Linux, and Macintosh platforms. U.S. list prices start at $1000.