Modeling of Block-Based DSP Systems

Modeling semantics based on dataflow graphs are used widely in design tools for digital signal processing (DSP). This paper develops efficient techniques for representing and manipulating blockbased operations in dataflow-based DSP design tools. In this context, a block refers to a finite-length sequence of data items, such as a sequence of speech samples, an image, or a group of video frames, as part of an enclosing data stream. We develop in this paper a meta-modeling technique called blocked dataflow (BLDF) for augmenting DSP design tools with more effective blocked data support in an efficient and general manner. We compare BLDF against alternative modeling approaches through a detailed case study of an MPEG 2 video encoder system.