An Entirely Model-Based Framework for Hardware Design and Simulation

For a long time, the code generation from domain-specific and/or model-based languages to implementation ones remained manual and error-prone. The use of modeling was required in the early stages of development to ease the design and communicate intents, but because of the manual implementation, there were no traceability and no formal link with the final code. Model-Driven Development (MDD) was unable to win its audience. Today, models constructed with UML have an equivalent representation in XML. And thanks to XML technologies, manipulating models for data mining, transformation or code generation becomes possible. MDD is now commonly used within the software community. Next, for the hardware community, this work will empower the use of MDD in hardware design and simulation. It offers a completely operational framework based on OMG standards: UML and MARTE.