Heterogeneous Design in Functional DIF

Dataflow formalisms have provided designers of digital signal processing (DSP) systems with analysis and optimizations for many years. As system complexity increases, designers are relying on more types of dataflow models to describe applications while retaining these implementation benefits. The semantic range of DSP-oriented dataflow models has expanded to cover heterogeneous models and dynamic applications, but efficient design, simulation, and scheduling of such applications has not. To facilitate implementing heterogeneous applications, we utilize a new dataflow model of computation and show how actors designed in other dataflow models are directly supported by this framework, allowing system designers to immediately compose and simulate actors from different models. Using examples, we show how this approach can be applied to quickly describe and functionally simulate a heterogeneous dataflow-based application such that a designer may analyze and tune trade-offs among different models and schedules for simulation time, memory consumption, and schedule size.