System Level Design with UML: a Unified Approach

This paper describes a fast prototyping tool targeting software radio applications. It is based on the Unified Modeling Language (UML) and combines a Software Defined Radio UML profile for implementing a real MDA approach with EDA tools for multi-level verifications from the type compatibility to the scheduling and memory use analysis over an heterogeneous platform. Our approach relies on performance analysis to improve architecture and application matching thanks to non-functional criteria. The main contributions of our work are the improvement of the original meta-model of the Software Radio UML profile which is currently under standardization and its integration within a unified design framework. From a high abstraction level of a software application we perform extensive verifications and analysis to validate the designer hardware architecture choice and the corresponding implementations.