A conservative extension of synchronous data-flow with state machines

  • Authors:

  • Jean-Louis Colaço;Bruno Pagano;Marc Pouzet

  • Affiliations:

  • Esterel-Technologies, France;Esterel-Technologies, France;LRI, Université Paris-Sud, France

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 5th ACM international conference on Embedded software
  • Year:
  • 2005

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Abstract

This paper presents an extension of a synchronous data-flow language such as Lustre with imperative features expressed in terms of powerful state machine à la SyncChart. This extension is fully conservative in the sense that all the programs from the basic language still make sense in the extended language and their semantics is preserved.From a syntactical point of view this extension consists in hierarchical state machines that may carry at each hierarchy level a bunch of equations. This proposition is an alternative to the joint use of Simulink and Stateflow but improves it by allowing a fine grain mix of both styles.The central idea of the paper is to base this extension on the use of clocks, translating imperative constructs into well clocked data-flow programs from the basic language. This clock directed approach is an easy way to define a semantics for the extension, it is light to implement in an existing compiler and experiments show that the generated code compete favorably with ad-hoc techniques. The proposed extension has been implemented in the ReLuC compiler of Scade/Lustre and in the Lucid Synchrone compiler.