Abstract

Signal flow graphs with dataflow semantics have been used in signal processing system simulation, algorithm development, and real-time system design. Dataflow semantics implicitly expose function parallelism by imposing only a partial ordering constraint on the execution of functions. One particular form of dataflow called synchronous dataflow (SDF) has been quite popular in programming environments for digital signal processing (DSP) since it has strong formal properties and is ideally suited for expressing multirate DSP algorithms. However, SDF and other dataflow models use first-in first-out (FIFO) queues on the communication channels and are thus ideally suited only for one-dimensional (1-D) signal processing algorithms. While multidimensional systems can also be expressed by collapsing arrays into 1-D streams, such modeling is often awkward and can obscure potential data parallelism that might be present. SDF can be generalized...

Citations