Case Study: Infraredx accelerates FPGA development and cuts development time by months with MathWorks Consulting Services (Simulink & HDL Coder)

Infraredx Accelerates FPGA Development on First-of-Its-Kind Intravascular Imaging System

Infraredx, developer of the FDA‑approved TVC Imaging System for detecting lipid core plaques, faced a bottleneck: their first IVUS implementation used handwritten HDL for an Altera Cyclone III FPGA, which consumed nearly all FPGA resources and required outside contractors for changes. To accelerate development and build in‑house FPGA expertise, Infraredx engaged MathWorks Consulting Services and used MATLAB, Simulink, Fixed‑Point Designer, and HDL Coder to model and validate the signal and image processing pipeline.

MathWorks Consulting Services trained Infraredx engineers, helped create a Simulink model, converted it to fixed point, generated VHDL with HDL Coder, and optimized the design for the Cyclone FPGA. The result: development time dropped from six months to three months and then to six weeks for the next iteration; generated HDL used the same multipliers but 9% less logic and 3% less memory, enabling twice as many filters on the same FPGA; and Infraredx gained the in‑house ability to simulate, generate HDL, and test changes on the FPGA in about 30 minutes.

Infraredx

John Beck

Principal Software Engineer