OVERVIEW

Communication systems convey information from a source or transmitter over a channel to a sink or receiver. Contemporary communication systems often do so in the presence of additive noise and mild to severe system non-linearities, which tend to corrupt the transmission. Examining the performance of a communication system as a set of analytical expressions, even if random noise and system nonlinearities can be described adequately, seems to provide little insight or motivation for a deeper understanding.

Communication systems have traditionally been designed by analysis software for the analytical equations of the inherent signal processing and by empirical methods using hardware brassboards in the laboratory. Because of the increased complexity evident in the modulation and demodulation of signals, simulation software is now a software brassboard that allows the design and virtual construction of complex communication systems without possessing a complete analytical understanding of the underlying process. Although communication system simulators do exhibit some limitations, their extent can usually be compensated for in the measurement of the performance of the system being modeled.

SystemVue by Agilent EESof (http://eesof.tm.agilent.com) is one such useful communication system simulation tool. This chapter introduces SystemVue (formerly known as SystemView by Elanix ) in a quick-start manner, with emphasis on the design and analysis environment and the available tokens from the libraries. Examples of the use of SystemVue for the simulation of familiar analog communication systems are provided to introduce the techniques.

On the CD The source files for these SystemVue...