MDE Support for HW/SW Codesign: A UML-based Design Flow

Abstract

The spread of technology is mostly possible thanks to the growing presence of Embedded Systems in our everyday lives. Embedded Systems are information processing devices enclosed in a variety of products such as cars, telecommunication or fabrication equipment. These devices must accomplish a large set of requirements and constraints to meet the computational demands of modern applications. As a matter of fact, Embedded Systems are very complex and heterogeneous systems, and this implies very difficult, expensive and time consuming design processes. Although MDE and Hw/Sw codesign are widely used to address the design complexity problem, the lack of design procedures and methodologies joining both concepts restrains their usage as complementary techniques, thus preventing the implementation of faster and more robust design cycles. In this chapter we present a practical semi-automated design flow where both methodologies are merged and exploited to enable a fast design process targeting highly complex Real-Time Embedded Systems, executing several tasks on SoC and MPSoC devices, while allowing the usage of Design Space Exploration, Schedulability Analysis and Estimation techniques.