An Open Framework for Detailed Hardware Modeling

When interfacing hardware and software design flows, it is a common practice to specify abstracted and understandable models in order to communicate design intends and to study interdependencies affecting design decisions. Modeling languages, such as UML, help to create architectural specifications amenable for reuse, complexity managing, and system refinements. This paper presents a set of extensions to UML that ensure description and conception of hardware through different views and detail levels. At the same time, the proposed extensions offer annotations to analyze and simulate the main extra-functional characteristics of embedded systems, namely, performance, power consumption and memory usage. This work is part of the upcoming OMG´s standard for modeling and analysis of real-time and embedded systems (MARTE).