A stochastic sum-of-sinusoids based simulation model is proposed for Rayleigh and Rician fading channels. The time-averaged statistical properties of the new model have been significantly improved compared to existing models. Verification of the proposed fading simulator is carried out by comparing its measured statistical properties with the properties of the ideal reference models. The simulator utilizes a time-overlapped implementation strategy to provide a compact design suitable for multiple antenna simulators. An implementation of the resulting Rician fading simulator on a Xilinx Virtex-II Pro XC2VP100- 6 FPGA uses only 2% of the configurable slices, 1% of the dedicated multipliers, and 2% of the on-chip block memories while generating 201 million 2 times 16-bit complex-valued fading samples per second. The scalable design of the fading channel simulator enables a straightforward implementation of multiple antenna channels and different diversity schemes.