The design complexity of digital hardware systems has grown at the same pace as the scale of integration of integrated circuits, and the need for functionality. This complexity gave rise to different design approaches at different levels of abstraction through time, being the current approach that proposing the description of the functionality of digital hardware systems using languages and tools similar to the ones employed to build software systems. Thus, it is possible to use the latest advances in software engineering to describe the functionality of modern digital circuits. This dissertation describes a design flow consisting of a dialect of UML 2 adapted to describe different algorithms operating on blocks of bits; and a transformation technology that generates structural VHDL code from the high-level models. The technology described in this document exploits the principles of object orientation, model-driven engineering, and transformation from models to text. The primary aim is to alleviate complexity during the design of digital hardware systems implementing demanding operations used by a wide range of computing devices. The generation of descriptions in VHDL from models describing algorithms used by the data processing stages of modern digital communication systems illustrates the usefulness of the proposed technology.