Novel reconfigurable computing platforms enable efficient realizations of complex signal processing applications by allowing exploitation of parallelization resulting in high throughput in a cost-efficient way. However, the design of such systems poses various challenges due to the complexities posed by the applications themselves as well as the heterogeneous nature of the targeted platforms. One of the most significant challenges is communication between the various computing elements for parallel implementation. In this paper, we present a communication interface, called the signal passing interface (SPI), that attempts to overcome this challenge by integrating relevant properties of two different yet important paradigms in this context — dataflow and the message passing interface (MPI). SPI is targeted towards signal processing applications and, due to its careful specialization, more performance-efficient for their embedded implementation. It is also more easier and intuitive to...