Laboratory Assignment 1
MATLAB Introduction
In this lab, you will be introduced to MATLAB by using it to evaluate expressions
containing complex numbers. Using MATLAB, you can easily express these complex
numbers in either rectangular or polar form. MATLAB’s plotting capabilities will be
introduced and used extensively. You will also use M-files and create some simple signal
processing functions that are used in later laboratory assignments.
1.1 OBJECTIVES
By the end of this laboratory assignment, you should be able to:
1. Use MATLAB to perform complex arithmetic.
2. Generate and plot signals and complex valued functions.
3. Confidently develop MATLAB M-files and save results of computations from a
MATLAB session.
1.2 REFERENCE
Review Topics:
1. Algebra of complex numbers
2. Sketching of discrete and continuous time signals
3. Vector and matrix algebra
1.3 INTRODUCTION
As you work through the problems and experiments in this course, you will be using
MATLAB - a powerful computing environment for numeric computation and
visualization - quite frequently. MATLAB is designed for ease of use and behaves as a
high-level programming language that is tailored for signal processing, communication,
and control tasks. It is used by professionals in industry and academia worldwide in
research, development, and design. An open source program having very similar
capabilities and commands is also available called Octave.
MATLAB, short for MATrix LABoratory, works on matrices of numbers. We focus
mostly on one-dimensional matrices called vectors that contain signal samples, or on
multiple-dimensional matrices containing several signals or the parameters of a system.
For example, a vector could contain just a list of values from a mathematical function that