it is not a new concept.. but getting popular in FPGA context... normally programming in fpga environment needs to be hardware expertise.... but now it is not necessary to know much abt digital processing cos of the benefits of automatic code generation... i have involved in one project which transform the UML to VHDL code... one of Myanmar stds is doing research in SIMTech on XML to Nec C transformation.. i have known some person who r doing on UML to Java.... and UML to C++..... anybody who is interested?