Bambu : A Free Framework for the High Level Synthesis of Complex Applications

This paper proposes bambu, a semi-automatic open-source framework to assist the designer during HLS, aiming at supporting most of the C constructs and directly interfacing with commercial tools for the synthesis to take technology aspects into account. Our framework receives as input the C description of the specification to be implemented and an XML configuration file, as shown in Figure 1. As output, it produces the HDL description of the corresponding hardware implementation and the scripts for the synthesis with the desired synthesis flow. At the moment, it is possible to support most of the C constructs, such as: • function calls and sharing of the corresponding modules; • pointer arithmetic and dynamic resolution of the memory addresses; • accesses to arrays/structs and any combination of them; • variables and structs passed either by reference or copy to the functions; • floating point arithmetic (single/double precision) and data types with different bit-width.