Analyzing and Optimizing Fixed-Point Operations on a MATLAB Simulink based Motion Control System

This paper deals with the analysis and optimization of fixed-point operations in the context of motion control systems and the MathWorks MATLAB® Simulink® environment. It presents a procedure for estimating the maximum arithmetic error of fixed-point operations inside a modeled control loop, which can be used to verify compliance with a defined precision. Additionally, it shows the results of a runtime analysis for different numerical data types in combination with two fixed-point operations: addition and multiplication. In order to improve the fixed-point performance for MATLAB® Simulink® models, two optimized implementations are provided, which can improve the fixed-point operations by a factor up to 3, compared to the automatically generated operation implementations. The paper results are based on the MATLAB® R2022b release.