Hardware
Although Model-based Systems Engineering (MBSE) was pioneered for the disciplines of military strategy and software engineering, hardware design engineers are using the effectiveness of (MBSE) for modeling of complex systems of systems because despite the success of the rigorous methods hardware design engineers exploit for the specification, analysis, and implementation of circuits, circuit packs, and processors, hardware engineers are struggling with both the complexity of specialized asymmetric multi-core processors and multi-function FPGAs and with the integration and traceability of those relatively self-contained systems into the larger system of organizational, personnel, and other non-hardware systems.
The capabilities of Artisan Studio which are compelling to Systems and Software Engineer are also compelling to hardware engineers and include collaboration, change management, profile customization, domain-specific modeling, and automated generation of implementation artefacts. Like their peers in other disciplines, hardware engineers can exploit these capabilities to improve their collaboration and their productivity.
Artisan participates – in lead roles – in the specification and implementation of several OMG Profiles which offer capabilities of specific appeal to hardware engineers. These include the System On Chip (SoC) Profile and the Modeling and Analysis of Real-time and Embedded Systems (MARTE) Profile.
SystemC, the implementation language for the SoC Profile, is a textual, system description language which provides an executable simulation engine for those systems which are specified with SystemC. SystemC provides capabilities for structural and behavioral modeling; structural elements include modules, ports, processes, channels, interfaces, events, and primitive data types while processes represent concurrent, behavioral elements.
There is a sufficiently strong conceptual similarity between SystemC and other system description languages such as AADL, MARTE, and VHDL or Verilog to enable nearly direct transformations between these system description languages.
MARTE is a UML2 profile which extends the UML to provide a discipline-specific graphical language which enables real-time engineers to express – in graphical, tabular, and textual form – many aspects of the engineering and analysis of time and resource constrained systems, especially systems composed of hardware and software. These profiles, along with Artisan Studio’s existing System Architecture profile, enable hardware engineers to more easily utilize the graphical languages of model-based Systems Engineering to specify and analyze the context within which their hardware systems are deployed.
Artisan Studio also offers MDA capabilities for the engineers of hardware-centric systems. Two such capabilities are a SystemC code generator and a VHDL generator. Both of these utilize Artisan Studio ACS/TDK to query, transform, and reverse-modify domain models into executable implementation artefacts.
To achieve full lifecycle integration, Artisan is partnering with Electronic Design Automation companies and Analysis and Simulation companies to implement integrated information synchronization between the respective tools which hardware engineers use.
For more details download the ACS/TDK – Data Sheet.
