A data flow graph generation method starting from c description by handling loop nest hierarchy

Abstract

The system-level synthesis of complex hardware or multiprocessing systems starts from some kind of a task description formalized usually in a high-level programming language. For this purpose, the C language is used very often. The further steps of the synthesis procedure are based on some kind of data flow graph representation of the task. Therefore, transforming C-code into a graph representation (as systematic as possible) is crucial step in the whole synthesis procedure. One of the difficulty in formalizing transformation algorithm is that the C-code may contain nested loops. The existing solutions suffer from the difficulty of handling such loop nest hierarchy. We present a method, which can solve systematically the transformation from the C-code into a multi-rate data flow graph representation by handling the nested loops. The main steps of the method are illustrated by a simple example.