Single-source hardware modeling of different abstraction levels with State Charts

Abstract

This paper presents an approach and a framework for hardware modeling on different abstraction levels, from untimed to cycle-accurate. Being based on UML State Charts, the graphical input language is intuitive to use and can directly serve as the documentation of the model. Compared to previous approaches, we propose an extension to UML that allows specifying all supported abstraction levels of a model in a single source, easing both development and debugging. We also present a code generator that allows selecting a specific abstraction level from the model to automatically generate SystemC code for it. Additionally, we use a modeling style extending existing work for purely cycle-accurate State Charts so that a previously presented code generation approach for VHDL can be reused.