Shift buffering technique for automatic code synthesis from synchronous dataflow graphs

This paper proposes a new efficient buffer management technique called shift buffering for automatic code synthesis from synchronous dataflow graphs (SDF). Two previous buffer management methods, linear buffering and modulo (or circular) buffering, assume that samples are queued in the arc buffers in the arrival order and are accessed by moving the buffer indices. But both methods have significant overhead for general multi-rate systems: the linear buffering method requires large size buffers and the modulo buffering method needs run-time overhead of buffer index computation. The proposed shift buffering method shifts samples rather than moving buffer indices. We develop optimal shift buffering algorithms to minimize the number of shifted samples. Our experimental results show that the proposed algorithm saves up to 90% of performance overhead while requiring the same amount of buffer memory as modulo buffering. Considering the sample copy overhead, shift buffering is applicable when memory size is more crucial than performance overhead, and the shifting overhead is less than the modulo addressing overhead. Another advantage of the shift buffering technique is that it supports the library code written with the linear buffering assumption, which is practically more important.