UML for real-time device driver development

In today´s embedded PC market the use of real-time systems is becoming more important everyday. Because of real time system´s specific requirements it is a challenge to use standard object oriented notation for design and definition of real-time tasks. Problem of efficient hard real-time system development and use of standard object-oriented notation as a base for high availability solution is a subject of this paper. In this paper, we are focused to show how standard object-oriented notation can be used for design and implementation of specific high availability real-time software solution. We have used real-time Linux extension as a base for real-time device driver for PC/104 synchronous serial adapter. Hard real-time requirements of synchronous serial communication demand a special kind of software design. For meeting hard real-time requirements we have used a standard object oriented notation-UML (unified modeling language). For the purpose of this work, we have used UML notation for real-time device driver design. The device driver designed in this work is used for synchronous serial communication. The results presented in this paper clearly show that the use of UML is one of the best ways for designing hard real-time systems. Also, results achieved in this work are a proof that software designed with standard object oriented notation is capable of satisfying most demanding hard real-time requirements.