High Level System-on-Chip Design using UML and SystemC

Due to the increasing complexity of Systems-On-Chip (SoC), there is a need for new design methodologies in order to develop designs at higher levels of abstraction, reduce the time to market, enable functional verification and conceptual correctness at early design stages, and simplify the hardware/software partitioning tasks. Recently, there has been a growing interest in using the Unified Modeling Language (UML) together with SystemC for the design of hardware/software systems at high levels of abstraction. In this paper, an approach to translate UML 2.0 notations to the SystemC language is presented. The UML notation is extended to represent SystemC elements through the adaptation of a UML profile for SystemC. An implementation example is given to illustrate the transformation process of UML to SystemC by means of modeling an encryption system based on the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES).