Towards Model-driven development of Embedded SoC with UML and SystemC?

The increasing complexity of most real-time and embedded systems coupled with requests for more performance and shorter time to market have produced a high interest to investigate advanced design methods and technologies that could simplify and improve the reliability of embedded software design and im-plementation, while promoting the reuse of software and hardware components for a co-design system development. From the first versions of UML [11], UML 1.x, designers of real-time and embedded systems have taken to UML with enthusiasm. However, the dream of a complete, model-driven design flow from specification through automated, op-timized code generation, has been difficult to realize without some key improve-ments in UML, specifically targeted to the real-time systems problem. With the enhancements in UML near standardization with UML 2.0, part of these improvements have been made, other are still to be achieved. This paper aims to describe how in the specific domain of embedded System-on-Chip (SoC), lightweight modeling methods, like UML, and some necessar