Software techniques for programming a general purpose data flow signal processor

A real time general purpose signal processor architecture has been developed previously [1,2]. This architecture utilizes parallel, pipeline and distributed processing approaches to achieve high speed computation. Software techniques for programming the data flow signal processor are presented since conventional programming languages are not suitable for programming fast parallel machines. Data flow graphs (DFG) are used to develop an interactive programming environment which will shield the programmer from the internal structure of the data flow signal processor (DFSP). The programming of the DFSP is demonstrated with an image processing application. This example illustrates that the direct convolution can be used to perform computations at video rates.