Visual methods of high-level system design for digital hardware components

Abstract

The article presents an analysis of using xtUML for high-level design of very large-scale integrated circuits. A design flow of digital VLSI circuits was investigated. The focus was made on the formalisation of the digital circuit models at the initial stages of system design. We studied specific features of developing a digital circuits’ system model that includes the behavioural description and the environment of the system being developed. This makes it possible to show the interaction between the very large-scale integrated circuits and other hardware components or measurement objects. However, further transition from the system level to the lower level in the hierarchical decomposition reveals the problem of “semantic gap”, meaning the complexity of the automated interpretation and formalisation of the conditional “rectangles” of the visual model to the form which could be interpreted by the tools used at the low-level design stages. The use of visual methods of system design is effective in the development of modern and highly sophisticated systems on a chip. We analysed xtUML diagrams at the system level of the digital very large-scale integrated circuit projects and formulated the procedure of using xtUML for developing digital VLSI circuits’ system models.