UML-Based System Level Design Methodology For Embedded Systems

As the high-speed development of microelectronics and very large scale integrated circuits (VLSI), modern embedded systems now represent the apex of complexity and heterogeneous nature. To cope with the increasing design complexity and shorten the time to market, the system-level design methodology has become the key approach which is combined with hardware/software co-design techniques and will raise design activities to a high level of abstraction. The Model Driven Architecture (MDA) is current momentous strategic orientation of software engineering. It defines a framework for software development based on a series of specifications defined by the Object Management Group (OMG). Key to MDA is the importance of models in the development process. Within MDA the development process is driven by the activity of modeling system. Comparing MDA with hardware/software co-design techniques, significant similarities exist between them, such as the abstract homogeneous behavioral description, system synthesis and system verification. Embedded systems design and software design may seem like separate disciplines. In this paper, we try to adopt the advanced techniques of software field to promote the progress of embedded systems design.This paper presented an UML-based System-level design methodology for embedded systems. It focused on Model Driven Architecture(MDA), Platform Independent Models(PIMs), Platform Specific Models(PSMs), model transformation and model verification. It mainly consists of the following four parts of contributions: 1). According to the final adopted draft specification of UML2.0, UML and its modeling abilities of embedded systems were introduced. We presented a new MDA-base design flow for embedded systems. There are two important features of this new design flow. First it separates the functionality specification from the implementation specification, PIMs for system functionalities and PSMs for system implementations. Then system synthesis is supported by an automated model transformation so that there can be an increased efficiency of design and system space exploration.2). SystemC language has the ability to model the system hardware by extending the C++ class library and support different abstract levels from register-transfer-level to system-level. It is on the step of becoming a de facto standard in industrial...