Functional DIF for Rapid Prototyping

Abstract

Dataflow formalisms have provided designers of digital signal processing systems with optimizations and guarantees to arrive at quality prototypes quickly. As system complexity increases, designers are expressing more types of behavior in dataflow languages to retain these implementation benefits. While the semantic range of DSP-oriented dataflow models has expanded to cover quasi-static and dynamic applications, efficient functional simulation of such applications has not. Complexity in scheduling and modeling has impeded efforts towards functional simulation that matches the final implementation. We provide this functionality by introducing a new dataflow model of computation, called enable-invoke dataflow (EIDF), that supports flexible and efficient prototyping of dataflow-based application representations. EIDF permits the natural description of actors for dynamic and static dataflow models. We integrate EIDF into the dataflow interchange format (DIF) package and demonstrate the approach on the design of a polynomial evaluation accelerator targeting an FPGA implementation. Our experiments show that a design environment based on EIDF can achieve functionally-correct simulation compared to Verilog, allowing the application designer to arrive at a verified functional simulation faster, and therefore at a functional prototype much more quickly than traditional design practices.