[Ground-station] MATLAB and hardware/software co-design

[Michelle Thompson]

We have a challenge getting the MATLAB workflow working in in #remote_labs
- HDL Coder and MATLAB Coder toolboxes are not available to “home”
licenses. If you have a “home” license (the very inexpensive one for
non-academic and non-commercial use) then you cannot buy things like LTE
Toolbox, or the ones necessary to do Hardware/Software co-design (HDL and
MATLAB Coder, in particular) that are needed to support things like the
zcu106 and zc706 (which are the boards we have).

Why is this important?

We want to go directly from MATLAB models to HDL. This gets us on the air
and testing very quickly with people that want to work with us. The sorts
of things we're looking at doing are M17 matlab models, Polar code models,
and machine learning models.

Having this workflow increases the utility to collaborators at universities
and makes it more possible to get more done for digital broadband amateur
radio work.

We already have a floating Vivado license, so that part of the process is
settled and working.

Either we try and get MATLAB to help us out here with a donation or
accomodation of some type, or we have to buy a license that is an order of
magnitude more expensive than the $150 home version.

We don’t really fit into any of the MATLAB license categories very easily,
but the “home” license looked like the most accurate. We’re not an academic
institution and we are not a commercial outfit. We do research, but we’re
non-profit.

Looking (as always) to open source solutions, I’m not seeing any. Please
double-check me here. I'm looking at Octave and the ICE40 codebases.

If purity of the tools we use along the way is the goal, then we can’t use
the hardware we have. Forgoing the use of modern SoCs is not an option to
me. I believe we deserve to be able to target large FPGAs with open source
designs.

I think that we get to a delivered open source design (this decade) most
efficiently by using industry standard and academic standard tools. This
means we’re going to have to talk to MATLAB about a better deal, or pony up
more money and upgrade the license. I think that the alternative is to work
entirely on open source FPGA and modeling toolchains.

Since this particular license wasn’t in the budget to begin with, and since
there really is significant disagreement across open source teams about how
“pure” to be when doing work, I’m sharing this decision-making process with
all of you and asking for feedback.

Do you have a contact at Mathworks that might help here? Then please let
them know we can’t do what we’re doing without HDL Coder and MATLAB Coder
toolboxes, and those aren’t available to the inexpensive license that this
non-profit uses. We’d like to work out a solution.

Is there another path forward that you know about?

I will cold-call Mathworks early next week, but personal contacts and our
wonderful network of participants has almost always been superior whenever
similar situations have arisen.

Thanks to everyone for supporting what we do. The support makes a big
difference, the work matters, and we’re making good progress.

-Michelle W5NYV
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