Mixing signals and modes in synchronous data-flow systems

  • Authors:
  • Jean-Louis Colaço;Grégoire Hamon;Marc Pouzet

  • Affiliations:
  • Esterel-Technologies, France;The MathWorks, USA;LRI, Université Paris-Sud, France

  • Venue:
  • EMSOFT '06 Proceedings of the 6th ACM & IEEE International conference on Embedded software
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

Synchronous data-flow languages such as SCADE LUSTRE manage infinite sequences, or streams, as primitive values making them naturally adapted to the description of dominated systems. Their conservative extension with means to define control-structures or modes has been a long-term research topic through which several solutions have emerged.In this paper, we pursue this effort and generalize existing solutions by providing two constructs: a general form of state machines called parameterized state machines, and valued signals, as can be found in ESTEREL. Parameterized state machines greatly reduce the reliance on error-prone mechanisms such as shared memory in automaton-based programming. Signals provide a new way of programming with multi-rate data in synchronous dataflow languages. Together, they allow for a much more direct and natural programming of systems that combine dataflow and state-machines.The proposed extension is fully implemented in the new LUCID SYNCHRONE compiler.