The MathWorks News & Notes - October 2006

Welcome to The MathWorks News & Notes

I was first exposed to MATLAB in 1986 as a graduate student, and it became the platform that I used throughout my research. Over the next decade, MATLAB transformed my field of control engineering, enabling researchers and practitioners to innovate at a much faster pace. MATLAB continues to evolve, growing in functionality and extending into many new applications. Articles in this issue highlight some of those applications—from communications and physics to financial modeling and water engineering.

As this issue shows, engineers are also using Simulink in a growing range of applications—from pharmacological modeling to hearing implant design.

I’ve been fortunate to have been involved in the development of Simulink from a very early stage. One of the most exciting things about Simulink to me is the way it has enabled engineering teams to replace fragmented development processes with Model-Based Design. This means using unambiguous executable specifications as a communication vehicle, performing rigorous testing at each step of the process, and automating the implementation via code generation.

Two articles illustrate the end-to-end development of an embedded system using Model-Based Design: Jaguar’s implementation and testing of electronic body systems, and Bell Helicopter’s design of the first civilian tiltrotor.

I hope that you enjoy these articles. As always, we welcome your feedback. Send comments and suggestions to newsnotes@mathworks.com

Andy Grace,
Vice President of Engineering, Design Automation