Hardware in the Loop from the MATLAB/Simulink Environment

This white paper describes the tools, design flow, and verification of systems using Altera® FPGAs. It discusses the techniques of software simulation and hardware testing, and the challenges associated with them. This paper also describes the advantages of using the Hardware in the Loop (HIL) tool, which is part of Altera’s software tools, to simplify software simulation and hardware testing in a variety of applications. To implement the HIL approach, you must create a communication link between the host development platform and the target deployment platform. The host-target communication infrastructure, called the MATLAB API, is provided by Altera as part of its system-in-the-loop solution. The communication link is established using a simple application programming interface (API) that is accessible from the MATLAB/Simulink tools by MathWorks. The MATLAB API protocol allows you to perform interactive communication with the target FPGA from the host computer.