Visualize Differences Between Floating-Point and Fixed-Point Results

This example shows how to configure the fiaccel function to use a custom plot function to compare the behavior of the generated fixed-point code against the behavior of the original floating-point MATLAB^® code.

By default, when the LogIOForComparisonPlotting option is enabled, the conversion process uses a time series based plotting function to show the floating-point and fixed-point results and the difference between them. However, during fixed-point conversion you might want to visualize the numerical differences in a view that is more suitable for your application domain. This example shows how to customize plotting and produce scatter plots at the test numerics step of the fixed-point conversion.

Copy Relevant Files

Open Live Script

Copy the myFilter.m, myFilterTest.m, plotDiff.m, and filterData.mat files to a local working folder.

Prerequisites

To complete this example, you must install the following products:

MATLAB
Fixed-Point Designer™
C compiler
See Supported Compilers.
You can use mex -setup to change the default compiler. See Change Default Compiler.

Inspect Example Files

It is best practice to create a separate test script to do all the pre- and post-processing such as loading inputs, setting up input values, calling the function under test, and outputting test results.

Type	Name	Description
Function code	`myFilter.m`	Entry-point MATLAB function
Test file	`myFilterTest.m`	MATLAB script that tests `myFilter.m`
Plotting function	`plotDiff.m`	Custom plot function
MAT-file	`filterData.mat`	Data to filter.

The myFilter Function

The myFilterTest File

The plotDiff Function

Set Up Configuration Object

Create a coder.FixptConfig object.
```
fxptcfg = coder.config('fixpt');
```

Specify the test file name and custom plot function name. Enable logging and numerics testing.

fxptcfg.TestBenchName = 'myFilterTest';
fxptcfg.PlotFunction = 'plotDiff';
fxptcfg.TestNumerics = true; 
fxptcfg.LogIOForComparisonPlotting = true;
fxptcfg.DefaultWordLength = 16;

Convert to Fixed Point

Convert the floating-point MATLAB function, myFilter, to fixed-point MATLAB code. You do not need to specify input types for the fiaccel command because it infers the types from the test file.

fiaccel -args {complex(0, 0)} -float2fixed fxptcfg myFilter

The conversion process generates fixed-point code using a default word length of 16 and then runs a fixed-point simulation by running the myFilterTest.m function and calling the fixed-point version of myFilter.m.

Because you selected to log inputs and outputs for comparison plots and to use the custom plotting function, plotDiff.m, for these plots, the conversion process uses this function to generate the comparison plot.

The plot shows that the fixed-point results do not closely match the floating-point results.

Increase the word length to 24 and then convert to fixed point again.

fxptcfg.DefaultWordLength = 24;
fiaccel -args {complex(0, 0)} -float2fixed fxptcfg myFilter

The increased word length improved the results. This time, the plot shows that the fixed-point results match the floating-point results.