Case Study: Wolfson Microelectronics achieves accelerated audio hub design verification and 100% datapath coverage with MathWorks (Simulink and HDL Coder)

Wolfson Microelectronics Accelerates Audio Hub Design Verification

Wolfson Microelectronics needed to create the WM8995, the world’s first multipath digital audio hub for smartphones, but traditional golden-reference verification (large input/output files) couldn’t scale to the many channel configurations and dynamic use cases. To solve this, Wolfson used MathWorks tools—MATLAB, Simulink, Fixed-Point Designer, and HDL Coder—to design, simulate, and verify the DSP datapath.

Using MathWorks Model-Based Design, Wolfson built floating‑point Simulink models, converted them to bit-accurate fixed‑point designs, and generated bit-true Verilog with HDL Coder to act as dynamic verification models; constrained-random simulations and automated FFT checks validated hundreds of scenarios. The MathWorks workflow cut an 8–9 week hand‑coding task to a day, achieved 100% datapath verification coverage, and accelerated debugging by about 20%.

Wolfson Microelectronics

Brian Paisley

Principal DSP Engineer