Model driven hardware design: One step forward to cope with the aerospace industry needs

Aerospace industries have to cope with the increasing complexity of their embedded systems. This gives a major importance to the design process, which must include various activities from the building-up of the system specifications to the system implementation, including architecture exploration and performance analysis. Model driven engineering addresses these issues by advocating the definition of a model at each design step. Models must then be linked together using transformations. In this paper, we define a model-based process for our Avionics Hardware design activities. We evaluate it on concrete hardware product design. Then we describe how we implement these models using a dedicated design environment named TOPCASED.