An MDA approach for the generation of glue code for a virtual simulation environment

This paper describes an approach and a set of MDA toolkits to integrate software and firmware subsystems modeled with Simulink and SysML in a system-level model for the purpose of functional simulation. Automatic code generation is applied to the SysML model to produce the glue code that integrates the software code and equivalent-behavior FPGA implementations in a virtual simulation platform, allowing the verification of large real-time industrial embedded applications. Following the tenets of the Model Driven Architecture and Platform Based Design, the proposed approach provides a method for the rapid prototyping and early validation of embedded functionality. The concept is illustrated by an industrial use case of a signal processing board.