Model Driven Engineering for Distributed Real-Time Embedded Systems 2009: Advances, Standards, Applications and Perspectives

Chapter 8

SoC/SoPC Development using MDD and MARTE Profile ¹

8.1. Introduction

Thanks to the ever-increasing performance of digital electronics, an entire embedded system can now be integrated on a single chip: i.e. a SoC — System on Chip — or a SoPC — System on Programmable Components — for FPGA — Field Programmable Gate Array — reconfigurable components.

In parallel, to catch up with this components complexity, a dramatic enhancement of hardware design productivity is required to avoid a “productivity gap” [ITR 07]. ESL — Electronic System Level — tools have emerged in order to tackle this issue by improving the level of abstraction of hardware developments. For example, some ESL tooling, enable us to simulate a design at TLM — Transaction Level Modeling — with SystemC language or to synthesize hardware architecture directly from C functional code rather than from a RTL — Register Transfer Level — description.

In addition to ESL modeling approaches, UML — Unified Modeling Language — [OMG 06b] originally dedicated to Software development has extended its scope to System or real time embedded application development through SysML — System Modeling Language — [OMG 08a] and MARTE — Modeling and Analysis of Real-Time Embedded systems — [OMG 07] profiles.

Moreover, MDA — Model Driven Architecture — [OMG 03], promotes a development methodology based on model transformations at several levels of abstraction and that follows the well known Y-Chart co-design approach: at each level, ...