Model driven engineering for SoC co-design

Abstract

SoC co-design requires to master a lot of different abstraction levels, different simulation techniques, different synthesis tools. Due to the evolution of the technologies, the best one is the one to come. Evolution of an embedded system both hardware and software, is not simple. The business logic has to be kept and the technical aspect has to be thrown. To improve the permanence of system on chip we have to abstract from the technical concerns. Model driven engineering (MDE) proposes a separation of concerns: application and technical concerns. The use of a modeling standard can capitalize system descriptions and improve system evolution and integration. A particular aspect of MDE concerns model transformations and code generation. At this level, the basic model driven architecture pattern involves the definition of a platform-independent model (PIM) and its automated mapping to one or more platform-specific models (PSMs). By defining different PIM and PSM dedicated to embedded systems, we show the benefits of using the MDE approach in system on chip codesign. From UML 2.0 profiles to SystemC or VHDL codes, the same model transformation engine is used with different rules expressed in XML.