Case Study: Philips Healthcare reduces risk and accelerates FPGA development with MathWorks Model-Based Design

Reducing Risk with Model-Based Design Q&A with Philips Healthcare

Philips Healthcare, a global leader in cardiac, acute, and home healthcare, needed precise control of timing and linearity while developing a digital RF power system for MRI. Their prior workflow—writing algorithms in C and manually translating them into VHDL for FPGA implementation—was slow and error-prone, so Philips adopted MathWorks’ Model-Based Design approach using Simulink to improve accuracy and development speed.

Using MathWorks’ Model-Based Design and Simulink to model the RF transmission chain, run bit-true simulations, and generate VHDL for FPGA, Philips was able to debug, optimize, and verify designs much faster. The solution reduced risk by finding problems earlier and producing consistent HDL: changes that once took a week to hand-code can be simulated and verified in about 30 minutes, and a filter redesign that would have required days of VHDL work was completed in under an hour, also yielding a lower-resource FPGA implementation.

Philips Healthcare

Marcel van Helvoort

Electronics Designer