Democratizing EDA access and boosting the EDA industry

OpenROAD is transforming several critical domains for EDA: education and workforce development, research, and tool access for chip architects and designers who seek quick and friction-free exploration of their innovative semiconductor chip design concepts.

“When a chip design tool license costs up to $1 million a year per copy, people can’t easily explore their ideas in silicon. That’s why many design teams see advantages with the OpenROAD tool — it’s free and very scalable, and it enables fast iterations on early design work,” said Kahng.

Traditionally, designing and verifying integrated circuit chips requires large teams of designers using complex and expensive computer-aided design tools for upwards of a year to perform chip floorplanning, device placement and routing — with different specialists and tool chains required for integrated circuits, systems-in-package and printed circuit boards.

Research teams, small companies and Department of Defense researchers often don’t have the human resources needed to even attempt such a daunting design task. Moreover, many organizations are priced out of integrated circuit design, putting a drag on innovation.

Given these roadblocks, open-source EDA such as OpenROAD has the potential to democratize silicon innovation.

The main OpenROAD deliverable — the EDA tool itself — now includes the work of over 120 contributors who have made more than 24,000 updates to the tool in GitHub. The open-source very-large-scale-integration design tool allows users to take novel chip concepts from the very beginning design stages, and produce a tapeout-clean, manufacturable layout within 24 hours. By reducing the cost to try out new chip designs for unique use cases, OpenROAD enables many research and startup ideas to come to fruition that previously wouldn’t have been financially possible, given the cost to design a one-off chip that may not even work.

Kahng, who has advocated for open-source semiconductor EDA tools for decades, said that his primary motivation has been to overcome the barriers to benchmarking and reproducibility in the industry, which have hindered research and innovation in chip design.

“Before OpenROAD, research papers could only be point tool focused. With OpenROAD, an algorithm can be tested and analyzed in the context of the full flow,” added Spyrou.“ This greatly increases the chances that academic research papers will provide industrial benefit. Given all of the papers based on OpenROAD, we can see this becoming very real now.”

Other open-source companies providing tools along the semiconductor design chain are already experiencing the benefits of the OpenROAD tool. For example, thanks to OpenROAD, chip prototyping company Efabless has experienced more than 1,000 new chip designs, 500 tapeouts and thousands of inspired new innovators.

“Thanks to OpenROAD and open-source EDA, students ranging from high schoolers to PhDs from over 50 institutions now have access to fabrication on Efabless chipIgnite,” said Michael Wishart, CEO of Efabless.  “Similarly, dozens of entrepreneurial product companies can now make custom chips to enable cool new products.”

The tool has been embraced by researchers in academia as well as industry, with well over 350 works citing the project GitHub and more than 160 citations of the project’s first learnings paper. Researchers at leading chip companies are also making use of the tool.

“NVIDIA is enabling Generative AI for EDA research with CircuitOps built on OpenROAD,” said Mark Ren, Director of Design Automation Research at NVIDIA.