A New Logic Circuit Design Methodology with UML

Abstract—In this paper we propose a new digital system design methodology which applies UML class diagrams on hardware design. We will use UML tools to model hierarchical hardware modules. We defined some attributes and visibilities for this purpose. In this paper, we also propose an automatic skeleton generator for hardware description language from UML. It utilizes XMI (XML Meta data Interchange format) as the input which is the standard interchange format for UML from OMG. Therefore, we can use any UML draw tools to design our hardware which can export the diagram as an XMI. This process consists of two tools one will convert XMI to extended SFL (we call it NSL), and the other will convert the NSL to SystemC or VerilogHDL or VHDL. Therefore, we can use SystemC for verification, and VerilogHDL for FPGA implementation. I