Dynamic data flow and control flow in high level DSP code synthesis

The design of today's complex digital signal processing systems, such as communication equipment, increasingly relies on sophisticated CAD tools for block diagram oriented analysis and simulation. Recent work has been concerned with the integration of such simulation tools and those for implementation, i.e. for hardware or software synthesis. Data flow oriented approaches have proven to be very well suited for both tasks due to the nature of most digital signal processing applications. The control of multiple cooperating data flow tasks (including resource management) is an important issue in most digital signal processor (DSP) based systems. This paper describes the integration of control flow into data flow oriented simulation and synthesis. A heterogeneous modeling scheme is proposed. The focus is kept on maintaining the efficiency and simplicity of the data paths while offering additional expressiveness which-as does the data flow paradigm-closely matches the way of thinking of communications system engineers. The usefulness of the novel concepts is demonstrated by a prototype implementation of a digital receiver for wireless data communication.<<ETX>>