Porting DSP applications across design tools using the dataflow interchange format

Modeling DSP applications through coarse-grain dataflow graphs is popular in the DSP design community, and a growing set of rapid prototyping tools support such dataflow semantics. Since different tools may be suitable for different phases or generations of a design, it is often desirable to migrate a dataflow-based application model from one prototyping tool to another. Two critical problems in transferring dataflow-based designs across different prototyping tools are the lack of a vendor-independent language for DSP-oriented dataflow graphs, and the lack of an efficient porting methodology. In our previous work, the dataflow interchange format (DIF) (C. Hsu et al., 2004) has been developed as a standard language to specify mixed-grain dataflow models for DSP systems. This paper presents the augmentation of the DIF infrastructure with a systematic porting approach that integrates DIF tightly with the specific exporting and importing mechanisms that interface DIF to specific DSP design tools. In conjunction with this porting mechanism, this paper also introduces a novel language, called the actor interchange format (AIF), for transferring relevant information pertaining to DSP library components across different tools. Through a case study of a synthetic aperture radar application, we demonstrate the high degree of automation offered by our DIF-based porting approach.