UML has been widely accepted by the software community for several years. As electronic systems design can no longer be seen as an isolated hardware design activity, UML becomes of significant interest as a unification language for systems description combining both HW and SW components. This article provides a comprehensive view of the UML applied to System-on-Chip (SoC) and hardware-related embedded systems design. The modeling concepts in the UML language are first introduced, including major diagrams for the representation of the behavior and the structure of systems. The principles behind application specific UML customizations (UML profiles) are summarized, and several examples relevant for SoC design are given, such as the SysML (System Modeling Language) and the SoC Profile. Thereafter, various approaches associating UML with existing HW/SW design languages are presented. Beyond language aspects, the article addresses the question of UML-based design flows, and shows how UML can be applied concretely to the development of electronic-based systems. The current situation about tool support constitutes the last focus of the article. In particular, we show how UML tools can be combined with well-known simulation environments, such as MATLAB.

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Abstract-This paper presents a low power pulsed UWB receiver sampling below Nyquist rate which can accomodate time-varying data rate and quality-of-service requirements for applications communicating via UWB. The performance of pulse amplitude and pulse position modulations is assessed in AWGN and dense multipath environments using the standard IEEE 802.15.3a channel models. The proposed subsampling receiver provides an attractive digital alternative to the classical approach based on analog correlations, and can reach data rates above 100 Mb/s.

UML is gaining increased attention as a system design language, as indicated by current standardization activities such as the SysML initiative and the UML for SoC Forum. Moreover the adoption of UML 2 is a significant step towards a broader range of modeling capabilities. This paper provides an overview of the impact of these recent advances on the application of UML for SoC and NoC development, proposes a modeldriven development method taking benefit of the best techniques recently introduced, and investigates the design of power efficient systems with UML.

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Abstract-This paper presents a flexible digital receiver for pulsed Ultra-Wideband (UWB) communications which is sampling below Nyquist rate. This receiver can trade demodulation performance for sampling rate, i.e. power consumption. The bit error rate for pulse amplitude and pulse position modulations is evaluated in AWGN and typical UWB channels. The performance of several types of equalizer is compared, taking into account their implementation complexity. A suboptimal but implementation efficient Minimum Mean-Square Error (MMSE) equalizer which reaches performances similar to the ideal MMSE equalizer is proposed. The impact of imperfect knowledge of the propagation channel and signal-to-noise ratio, due to the limited number of training symbols, on the performance of the receiver is assessed. Finally, the receiver architecture and implementation cost are discussed. The proposed subsampling receiver provides an attractive alternative to classical architectures based on correlation with a template.

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