Contributor - Fixed Point Module for Xcos
Description
Add intrinsic fixed-point capabilities to Xcos, which is important in designing control and signal processing systems.
Features should allow the user to execute bit-true simulations to observe the effects of limited range and precision on designs built with Xcos. Users should be able to control fixed-point data type and of scaling from 1 to 128 bit word sizes. Tools for converting models from floating- to fixed-point data types and for identifying overflow and saturation errors are very valuable.
Designs typically require trading off range and precision, so automatic scaling tools are also desirable.
Ideas
- Provide a list of needed blocks
Is libfixmath able to handle the need ?
Use Eigen to handle matrix operation
Comparison with other systems
In Scilab, a commercial Fixed Point Module is provided by Equalis [5].
The design choice for this project may be discussed, because it might be useful to have the fixed point toolbox also for Scilab, independently of XCos.
In Matlab, many features are organized in two separate software components
- the Matlab toolbox (which provides the computational functions to Matlab),
- the Simulink blockset (which provides the graphics features to Simulink).
This is a good design choice, because this allows to have the feature from both point of views (Matlab and Simulink) : having only one part or another is only partly useful.
In Matlab, the fixed point feature is provided, as far as we can infer from the help pages, from the toolbox "Fixed point designer" [4], which provides the feature both to Matlab and Simulink [3].