Modern embedded systems require a tight integration among sev- eral heterogeneous components including digital and analog HW, as well as HW-dependent SW. In literature there is a lack of a com- plete approach, allowing reuse and at the same time supporting cor- rect integration of heterogeneous components. Indeed, traditional approaches rely either on homogeneous top-down methodologies (that do not allow reuse) or on co-simulation (that does not guaran- tee correct integration). This paper proposes to combine IP-XACT and UNIVERCM. The former is an IEEE standard for specifying interface and communication style of digital IPs. The latter is a computational model that allows to represent the starting heteroge- neous components in a homogeneous way. In this way, IP-XACT is used in this paper to support the integration of general heteroge- neous components, to extract component interfaces and to generate the necessary connecting modules. Furthermore, UNIVERCM al- lows to generate a homogeneous representation of the components behavior (in a bottom-up flow) to allow simulation and validation of the generated components and of the final system. Thus, this strange pair allows integration and validation of system communi- cation. The effectiveness of this novel approach has been proven on complex heterogeneous benchmarks.