Title | Compositional Dataflow Circuits |
Publication Type | Conference Paper |
Year of Publication | 2017 |
Authors | Edwards, Stephen A., Townsend, Richard, Kim, Martha A. |
Conference Name | Proceedings of the 15th ACM-IEEE International Conference on Formal Methods and Models for System Design |
Publisher | ACM |
Conference Location | New York, NY, USA |
ISBN Number | 978-1-4503-5093-8 |
Keywords | composability, compositionality, Computing Theory, dataflow, high-level synthesis, kahn networks, pubcrawl |
Abstract | We present a technique for implementing dataflow networks as compositional hardware circuits. We first define an abstract dataflow model with unbounded buffers that supports data-dependent blocks (mux, demux, and nondeterministic merge); we then show how to faithfully implement such networks with bounded buffers and handshaking. Handshaking admits compositionality: our circuits can be connected with or without buffers and still compute the same function without introducing spurious combinational cycles. As such, inserting or removing buffers affects the performance but not the functionality of our networks, which we demonstrate through experiments that show how design space can be explored. |
URL | http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/3127041.3127055 |
DOI | 10.1145/3127041.3127055 |
Citation Key | edwards_compositional_2017 |