On tokens and signals: Bridging the semantic gap between dataflow models and hardware implementations
Stavros Tripakis, Rhishikesh Limaye, Kaushik Ravindran, Guoqiang Wang · 2014
Dataflow models serve as useful abstractions of digital hardware in signal processing and other application domains. But when can one say that a certain dataflow model faithfully captures a given piece of hardware? To answer this question we develop a formal conformance relation between the heterogeneous formalisms of (1) finite state machines with synchronous semantics, used to model hardware, and (2) asynchronous processes communicating via queues, used as a formal model for dataflow. The conformance relation preserves performance properties such as worst-case throughput and latency.