Researcher: | Stephen A. Edwards |
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Advisor: | Edward A. Lee |
Sponsors: | National Science Foundation Fellowship, ARPA and the US Air Force (under the RASSP program, contract F33615-93-C-1317) and the Ptolemy project. |
Esterel modules share certain properties with dataflow actors. They react to events at their inputs, and produce events on their outputs. But to maintain determinacy, dataflow actors have much tighter constraints on how they can interact with input and output signals. For example, they cannot test an input for the presence of an event. Ptolemy's Boolean Dataflow domain (described by Buck [2]) relies on these properties to efficiently compile a graph. Since Esterel modules are not guaranteed to obey these constraints, embedding Esterel efficiently within Boolean dataflow is nontrivial.
The objective of this project is to identify methods for efficiently embedding Esterel's semantics into Boolean Dataflow actors. Combining the two worlds will allow sophisticated control-flow to be specified and easily compiled in a dataflow environment well-suited to digital signal processor applications.