Abstract
Inherent complexity of heterogeneous system design has been traditionally faced by means of abstraction and design automation. At the highest level of abstraction, the Unified Modeling Language (UML) can be extended to model the whole system under design in an homogeneous fashion. In this paper, a design methodology based on the UML is presented. The benefits of using such a methodology are highlighted taking the design of an MPEG-4 decoder as example.