On tokens and signals: Bridging the semantic gap between dataflow models and hardware implementations

Dataflow models serve as useful abstractions of digital hardware in signal processing and other application domains. But when can one say that a certain dataflow model faithfully captures a given piece of hardware? To answer this question we develop a formal conformance relation between the heterogeneous formalisms of (1) finite state machines with synchronous semantics, used to model hardware, and (2) asynchronous processes communicating via queues, used as a formal model for dataflow. The conformance relation preserves performance properties such as worst-case throughput and latency.