UML - The Emerging Hardware Description Language?

The Unified Modeling LanguageTM (UML) has received a wide acceptance in the area of software engineering over the last years. In its last revision, UML [4] (i.e., UML 2.0) is composed of a set of structural (classes, components, composite structures, deployments) and behavioral concepts (actions, activities, state machines, interactions, use cases), which are clearly separated from their visual representation, i.e., the diagrams composed of graphical symbols. Meanwhile, some UML diagrams and their variations also found application in various areas for electronic systems design like requirements specification, testbenches, architectural descriptions, and behavioural modelling [1]. Nevertheless, in most cases they are just applied as a graphical language for drawing diagrams. This is partly due to UML’s weak and/or inappropriate behavioral semantics. Therefore, in its first introduction to hardware design, UML’s greatest potential certainly lies in its structural parts, which apply well to current practices in IP integration and packaging for component and interface descriptions and which seamlessly complement current HDLs.