Embedded Plant/Process Simulator: Design and System Integration for Scalable FFT/IFFT Computations

For today's industry, system simulation is an integral part of design and implementation. This is a process that often involves tight coupling between hardware, interface, and algorithmic adaptation. This paper discusses the design and implementation of a plant/process simulator on an integrated mbed LPC1768 based microcontroller platform. Unlike simulators such as MATLAB, Scilab, Scicos, Ecosim Pro, Virtual Control Simulator, etc. that are installed on a computer, the simulator is implemented on a portable, low-cost embedded microcontroller. The method of simulation is convolution via FFT/IFFT using the Radix-2 DIT Cooley-Tukey algorithm. Our implementation is verified using both step and sinusoidal inputs. The results of the simulator are compared to MATLAB outputs as the reference for accuracy determination.