New features introduced:
– Added support to GCC 6 and GCC 7 (GCC 4.9 is still the preferred GCC compiler).
– Added support to bitfields.
– Added support for pointers and memory operations to the Discrepancy Analysis. Reference paper: Pietro Fezzardi and Fabrizio Ferrandi, “Automated bug detection for pointers and memory accesses in High-Level Synthesis compilers”, in 2016 26th International Conference on Field Programmable Logic and Applications (FPL), 2016.
– Added new option: –discrepancy-only=comma,separated,list,of,function,names
Restricts the discrepancy analysis only to the functions whose name is in the list passed as argument.
– Added new option: –discrepancy-permissive-ptrs
Do not trigger hard errors on pointer variables.
– added preliminary support to TASTE integration. Reference paper: M. Lattuada, F. Ferrandi, and M. Perrotin, “Computer Assisted Design and Integration of FPGA Accelerators in Aerospace Systems,” in Proceedings of the IEEE Aerospace Conference, 2016, pp. 1-11.
– Added support to OpenMP SIMD. Reference paper: M. Lattuada and F. Ferrandi, “Exploiting Vectorization in High Level Synthesis of Nested Irregular Loops,” Journal of Systems Architecture, vol. 75, pp. 1-14, 2017.
– Default golden reference is now input C code without any modification.
– The options –synthesize and –objectives have been removed. Now the same values passed with –objectives can
be directly passed through the option –evaluation.
– Improved the precision and the effectiveness of the Bit Value analysis and optimizations.
– Improved detection of irreducible loops.
– Improved CSE.
– Added a frontend transformations that merge some operations into FPGA LUTs.
– Now frontend explicitly introduces function calls to softfloat functions.
– Added support to block RAM with latency = 3 (–high-latency=4).
– Added bambu option –fsm-encoding=[auto,one-hot,binary].
– Added a new option: –disable-reg-init-value
Used to remove the INIT value from registers (useful for ASIC designs)
– Improved mapping of multiplications on DSPs.
– Added a GCC plugin to apply the whole program optimization starting from the topfname function instead of main function (currently only GCC 4.9 is supported).
– Added further integer division algorithms:
– non-restoring division with unrolling factor equal to 1 (–hls-div=nr1) which becomes the default division algorithm.
– non-restoring division with unrolling factor equal to 2 (–hls-div=nr2)
– align divisor shift dividend method (–hls-div=as)
– Added a specialization of the integer division working with 64bits dividend and 32bits divisor.
– Single precision floating point faithfully rounded expf and logf functions implemented following the HOTBM method published by
– Jeremie Detrey and Florent de Dinechin, “Parameterized floating-point logarithm and exponential functions for FPGAs”, Microprocessors and Microsystems, vol.31,n.8, 2007, pp.537-545.
The code has been exhaustively tested and it supports subnormals.
– Single precision floating point faithfully rounded sin, cos, sincos and tan functions implemented following the HOTBM method published by
– Jeremie Detrey and Florent de Dinechin, “Floating-point Trigonometric Functions for FPGAs” FPL 2007.
The code has been exhaustively tested and it supports subnormals.
– Single precision floating point faithfully rounded sqrt function implemented following the method published by
– Florent de Dinechin, Mioara Joldes, Bogdan Pasca, Guillaume Revy: Multiplicative Square Root Algorithms for FPGAs. FPL 2010: 574-577
The code has been exhaustively tested and it supports subnormals.
– Implemented the port swapping algorithm as described in the following paper:
– Hao Cong, Song Chen and T. Yoshimura, “Port assignment for interconnect reduction in high-level synthesis,” Proceedings of Technical Program of 2012 VLSI Design, Automation and Test, Hsinchu, 2012, pp. 1-4.
– Improved support to structs passed by copy.
– Improved ROM identification.
– Added a new option: –rom-duplication
Assume that read-only memories can be duplicated in case timing requires.
– Improved memory initialization.
– Added some transformations that lowered some memcpy and memset call to simple instructions.
– Improved softfloat functions for basic single and double precisions operations: sum, sub, mul and division.
Now addition and subtraction operations correctly manage operand equal to +0 and -0.
– Added three options to control which softfloat and libm libraries are used: –softfloat-subnormal, –libm-std-rounding and –soft-fp.
– Fixed builtin isnanf.
– Added double precision implementation of libm round function.
– Added __builtin_lrint, __builtin_llrint, __builtin_nearbyint to libm library.
– Fixed and improved tgamma and tgammaf function.
– Added support to parallel compilation of bambu libraries.
– Added support to the automatic configuration of newer releases of Quartus for IntelFPGAs.
– Improved verilator detection.
– Improved libicu detection.
– Improved boost filesystem macro.
– Fixed problems due to -m32 under arch linux.
– Fixed compilation problems with glpk and ubuntu 14.04.
– Fixed a problem with long double. They now have the same size of double.
– Added support to Mentor Visualizer.
– Improved components characterization and timing models.
– Extended support to VHDL.
– Now VHDL modelsim simulation uses 2008 standard.
– Extended set of synthesis scripts and synthesis results.
– Improved area reporting for Virtex4 devices.
– Improved characterization of asynchronous RAMs.
– Fixed extraction of slack delay from ISE trce and Lattice reports.
– Fixed yosys backend wr.r.t the newer Vivado releases.
– Added SLICES to the set of data collected by characterization.
– Extended set of regression tests.

Quality of results of this release on different target FPGAs could be found at:
– CHStone QoR.
– libm QoR.
– Basic FP operations QoR.

For any information or bug report, please write to panda-info@polimi.it or visit the google group page.