RF Microwave Toolbox

Note

This section only gives an overview on the RF Microwave Toolbox, for all details, see the dedicated doc.

Analog Devices RF Microwave Toolbox For MATLAB and Simulink is a set of tools to model, interface, and target with ADI RF devices within MATLAB and Simulink. These are combined into a single Toolbox which contains a set of Board Support Packages (BSP). The list of supported boards is provided below.

Quick Start with Toolbox

The current stable Toolbox can be downloaded from the ADI RFMicrowaveToolbox repository (releases). Download the latest mltbx file then open that file within MATLAB. Opening the file will automatically install the Toolbox, adding the necessary components to your MATLAB path. The “Analog Devices, Inc. RF Microwave Toolbox” will appear in your Add-Ons Explorer within MATLAB.

Download

Analog Devices Inc, RF Microwave Toolbox Release Page.

To interface and stream data with hardware will require installation of Libiio and one of two Hardware Support Packages from MathWorks. The libiio library can be obtained from the ADI libiio repository.

Libiio Installers

Download

Stable releases are available at ADI libiio repository (releases).

These support packages provide the necessary libIIO MATLAB bindings used by ADI’s system objects. Starting in R2024a, the functionality of Communications Toolbox Support Package for Xilinx Zynq-Based Radio is included in SoC Blockset Support Package for AMD Devices.

Download

For releases after R2024a:

SoC Blockset Support Package for AMD FPGA and SoC Devices

For Releases R2023b and before, either:

Communications Toolbox Support Package for Xilinx Zynq-Based Radio

Communications Toolbox Support Package for Analog Devices ADALM-Pluto Radio

Important

Skip the Zynq SDR or ADALM-PLUTO post-installation steps. They are not used. See Kuiper documentation for the FPGA carrier board SD card images.

Toolbox Dependencies

Depending on your needs, different toolboxes will be required. For basic data streaming into MATLAB or Simulink only the following MathWorks toolboxes are required:

• Communications Toolbox

• DSP System Toolbox

• Signal Processing Toolbox

• SoC Blockset

• SoC Blockset Support Package for AMD FPGA and SoC Devices (FREE)

For HDL code generation the following are required:

• HDL-Coder

• Xilinx Zynq Support from HDL Coder (FREE)

Building the Toolbox Manually

The toolbox can only be built under Linux or with Cygwin on a Windows platform. Conveniently, the entire process is automated with a Makefile located in the CI/scripts folder of the repository. The following is required on the system before the build process can be run:

• A supported MATLAB version installed in the default location (/usr/local/MATLAB)

• A supported Vivado version installed in the default location (/opt/Xilinx)

• Packages: git zip unzip tar make wget sed

Warning

You should only manually build the toolbox if you require a custom branch or no toolbox installer is available

First clone the repo and move into it:

git clone https://github.com/analogdevicesinc/RFMicrowaveToolbox.git

cd RFMicrowaveToolbox

To build the toolbox run the following:

make -C CI/scripts build

To create an installable tlbx file run:

make -C CI/scripts gen_tlbx

Device Control and Data Streaming

Device interfaces which provide control and data streaming are implemented with MATLAB System Objects and Simulink Blocks. These System Objects can be accessed under the “adi” namespace in MATLAB and are followed by their part number or board name and finally Tx or Rx:

adi.<Part or Board Name>.<Tx or Rx>

For example, to instantiate a Stingray object to control the X-Band Development Platform it can be created as follows:

bf = adi.Stingray;

The Stingray Evaluation board contains an ADXUD1AEBZ, ADF4371 and ltc2314-14. Therefore, it uses the objects corresponding to these devices along with ADAR100x, a generic ADAR1000 superclass under the hood. Similarly, ADALM-PHASER class is also derived from low level objects based on their parts.

For example usage of certain objects, it can be useful to inspect their related test code which exercises instantiations in different configurations. The available code is available in the GitHub repo folder here, where object tests have the naming convention <Object>Tests.m.

To get a list of currently available objects with the BSP installed simply run:

help adi

To get more information on a given object run:

help adi.<Part or Board Name>

or

doc adi.<Part or Board Name>

Common Attributes

There are some common attributes that need to be set for system objects and parts.

• uri Context address of IIO device.

  • IP with usage ‘’bf.uri = ‘ip:192.168.2.1’ ‘’

Extending Interfaces

If a driver attribute or setting is not available in the standard objects it can be easily extended to cover more IIO attributes. See this guide.

Examples

Examples for streaming data and targeting FPGAs are listed within the Toolbox documentation itself. To view run the following with MATLAB:

doc adi

They can also be viewed on GitHub:

• Examples

Supported Boards

The following have device-specific implementations in MATLAB and Simulink. If a device has an IIO driver, MATLAB support is possible, but a device-specific MATLAB or Simulink interface may not exist yet.

Table 1 Supported Parts

Evaluation Card	FPGA Board	Streaming Support	Targeting	Variants and Minimum Supported Release
ADALM-PHASER	NA	Yes	No	ADI (2021b)
Stingray	ZCU102	Yes	No	ADI (2021b)

Further Reading

For more information, check out the dedicated documentation which contains useful information such as:

• Installation

• Data Streaming

• Reference API

Help & Support

Questions? Ask Help & Support.