DIF: An Interchange Format for Dataflow-Based Design Tools

The dataflow interchange format (DIF) is a textual language that is geared towards capturing the semantics of graphical design tools for DSP system design. A key objective of DIF is to facilitate technology transfer across dataflow-based DSP design tools by providing a common, extensible semantics for representing coarse-grain dataflow graphs, and recognizing useful sub-classes of dataflow models. DIF captures essential modeling information that is required in dataflow-based analysis and optimization techniques, such as algorithms for consistency analysis, scheduling, memory management, and block processing, while optionally hiding proprietary details such as the actual code that implements the dataflow blocks. Accompanying DIF is a software package of intermediate representations and algorithms that operate on application models that are captured through DIF. This paper describes the structure of the DIF language together with several implementation and usage examples.