Roll your own Hardware Description Language An Experiment in Hardware Development using Model Driven Software Tools

The work presented here is a first study made at ESEO1 by the research team TRAME (Model Transformations for Embedded Systems) for the semiconductor company ATMEL Nantes. This experiment consists in exploring the possibilities of ModelDriven Development (MDD) and model transformation in the context of digital hardware design. Through the definition of several meta-models and model transformations dedicated to hardware design, some observations have been carried out regarding the use of an existing MDD tool (ATL suite of the ATLAS team of the LINA) in the context of industrial practices.