High-performance programs by source-level merging of RVC-CAL dataflow actors

RVC-CAL is a dataflow language that has acquired an ecosystem of sophisticated design tools. Previous works have shown that RVC-CAL-based applications can automatically be deployed to multiprocessor platforms, as well as hardware descriptions with high efficiency. However, as RVC-CAL is a concurrent language, code generation for a single processor core requires careful application analysis and scheduling. Although much work has been done in this area, to this date no publication has reported that programs generated from RVC-CAL could rival handwritten programs on single-core processors. This paper proposes performance optimization of RVC-CAL applications by actor merging at source code level. The proposed methodology is demonstrated with an IEEE 802.15.4 (ZigBee) transmitter case study. The transmitter baseband software, previously written in C, is rewritten in RVC-CAL and optimized with the proposed methodology. Experiments show that on a VLIW-flavored processor the RVC-CAL-based program achieves the performance of manually written software.