All the innovating actors located in Brittany dealing with new technologies for image processing, network deployment and computer systems rely their production on platform and software development dedicated to their profession and skills. Model engineering enables designers to capitalize their knowledge in analyzing, designing, developing, and validating their systems and thus allows:

• To increase their productivity by reusing software techniques, architectures and/or components (targeting hardware or software components).
• To promote the flexibility, interoperability, maintainability of these applications and/or systems.
• To assure the functionality of the systems.

The aim of the MOPCOM project is to help designers to deal with high complexity systems by designing their developments using modeling approaches for their applications and platforms. To provide efficient solution, the goal of the MOPCOM project is also to target modeling techniques driven by application domains in order to provide specific design guide and rules. Refinement techniques are essential to promote these approaches as they help designers along the design process.

Systems designed by companies involved in the project are increasingly complex and require new design methodologies and associated tools to manage such a complexity. For the development of heterogeneous systems integrating hardware and software components, requiring update along the time and providing several sub products, reusability is mandatory in order to reduce the design cycle and to promote already developed projects.

This conclusion which is actually not new, is coming back into the picture thanks to new developments around UML (Unified Modeling Language from OMG – Object Management Group). The goal is thus to help designers to design their systems for an application/system or a family of applications/systems from the analysis through use cases to code generation and final tests. This approach called Model-Driven Architecture/Engineering MDA/MDE is becoming strategic for major companies in the electronic domain (e.g. France Télécom, IBM, Thales, Thomson…).

MDA/MDE provides a solution solving major engineering problems of electronic systems from the analysis to the validation and maintainability thanks to available traceability using such techniques. Furthermore model transformation allows for designers faster and safer systems as each step is clearly formalized.

The solutions provided in the MOPCOM project intend to be generic enough to deal with the development of SoC (System on Chip) or SoPC (System on Programmable Chip) onto FPGAs and to model telecom services and associated data systems.

Capitalization of skills and experiences is strategic for large companies and is becoming possible by the use of meta-models which are directly involved in the development process using MDA/MDE approaches.

The MOPCOM project is focused on model engineering using MDA approaches to develop SoC/SoPC. Thus the design process requires:

• The specification of the functional needs in order to improve product capitalization and interfaces between system designers, software designers and architecture designers.
• The specification of the SoC/SoPC platform and the deployment of the application onto the architecture throughout the design process from the system design down to the code description and circuit design.
• The capitalization of the design process and associated tools in order to reduce design cycle of SoC/SoPC.

The project aims to provide a formalized design process (design methodology) and the associated tools in order to target:

• The design at different levels of abstraction, from system TLM level down to architecture RTL level.
• The design of reconfigurable systems that may be reconfigured at run time.

A MDA/MDE prototype tool will be developed during the project that will perform code generation (SystemC and VHDL) from a specification description using UML. This prototype will rely on adapted profiles for real time embedded system from the system description down to the architecture description.

It is important to underline that MDA/MDE approach corresponds to a major change in the design flow of SoC/SoPC from previous technologies promoted by EDA vendors.

Regarding the design flow of SoC/SoPC traditional approach relies on HW/SW partitioning early in the design process and splits the process into two separate flows which will be almost independent down to the integration and validation steps. This type of approach is clearly reaching its limits as it freezes too early in the design flow some major architectural decisions and does not provide any guarantee in terms of modifications frequently occurring along the design and coding processes. The coding is generally manual and relies on skills not encapsulated into the design process but specific to the designer. This separation between designer experience and tool should be mitigated.

On the contrary, structured MDA approach aims to capture design skills and experience through transformations that are approved, reproducible and semi automatic. The separation between HW and SW is replaced by these transformations that progressively refine the system design. This approach has been pushed for a long time by the codesign community but takes benefits of technologies related to UML and MDA promoted by OMG.

Furthermore EDA tools target a niche market dealing with codesign. Underlying models and transformations techniques, code generation techniques are proprietary and are generally not accessible to the designer who cannot improve the tool depending on his specific experience. A more open approach is required in order to help designers tuning their design methodology along with new designs.

Using an MDA approach, each step of the design process of SoC/SoPC is formalized through meta-models and the refinement from one step to another is clearly defined through transformation rules. These meta-models and transformation rules are based on standards defined by OMG (such as the new MARTE profile) and can be instrumented through UML modelers and generic transformation tools used for example in the domain of software design. Most of these tools are open and promote the extension of the tools for specific use.

This approach enables to provide a SoC/SoPC design framework mitigating obsolescence since being more generic and independent from the tools.

In the MOPCOM project the target applications are characterized by intensive computations.

SoCs developed by Thomson integrate video compression and/or decompression algorithms for high definition TV and are generally related to diffusion standards. These algorithms in their non-executable form are generally provided by agencies working on standardization. After MPEG2 definition, almost ten years ago, the way is now open for new standards reaching higher compression ratio as MPEG4/AVC. But some new standards are also appearing especially those related to internet as the WMV standard developed by Microsoft. The domain of digital video is thus very active and the designers need to pay attention to the requirements of a specific norm but without ignoring new emerging standards, which is occurring increasingly more often.

The viability of an applicative solution implemented onto silicon requires the definition of architectures flexible enough in order to face new standards. These architectures have to be reprogrammable and to provide enough computation power. Multiprocessor architectures on silicon (SoC and SoPC) associated to NoC meet these requirements.

This need of flexibility and homogeneity is also required at the level of application specification as today initial executable specifications of the applications are defined through several models and languages that are mainly targeting work station execution without any information related to potential parallelism within the application. It is mandatory to capture application through a more neutral specification. Same analysis can be made concerning non functional constraints, even less considered in current design flows.

Applications developed by Thales are related to digital receiver/emitter for data processing for many application domains and especially radio application, radar, and digital monitoring.

Improvement on FPGA performances and analog-to-digital converters enables designers to perform most of the computation on the signal coming from the antenna (RF part) in digital rather than analog as previously performed. These computations are characterized by:

• High computation requirements.
• High flexibility in order to deal with electromagnetic environment changes and to be independent from current standard to face future evolutions of radio systems. Flexibility is also required to reduce the number and the type of RF interfaces.

It is essential to develop a design process independent of the execution platform:

• As the computation including RF sensors may be implemented in various platforms depending on algorithmic needs, platform and components evolutions. Furthermore a same processing could be implemented in different components (HW or SW) depending on the requirements.

The design process needs to take into account these features in order to promote reusability and portability of the application.

For these two kinds of applications, MDA approach will bring abstraction, formalization, and automatic transformations of the design process which will improve portability and reusability of applicative elements.

Several results are expected from MOPCOM in order to provide a full demonstrator by the end of the project:

• Definition of a design process based on MDA model driven engineering to design SoC/SoPC.
• The design process should be fully compatible with system design process and software design for domain applicative capitalization.
• Compatible with industrial development process for SoC/SoPC and formalizing this development process.
• Take into account SoC/SoPC specificities at the platform level (e.g. reconfiguration).
• Definition of meta-models using latest releases of OMG developments and standards (MARTE profile).
• Development of a prototype tool which aims to become a commercial product to distribute the design process based on a UML modeler.
• Development of UML specification tool from system level specifications.
• Development of model transformation rules and code generation for UML to VHDL transformation and UML to SystemC transformation for reconfigurable systems.
• Development of documentation generator for traceability and description.
• Validation of the design process for Thomson and Thales applications through relevant metric analysis and performance models.