Welcome to OpenROAD’s documentation!#

The OpenROAD (“Foundations and Realization of Open, Accessible Design”)project was launched in June 2018 within the DARPA IDEA program. OpenROADaims to bring down the barriers of cost, expertise and unpredictability thatcurrently block designers’ access to hardware implementation in advancedtechnologies. The project team (Qualcomm, Arm and multiple universities andpartners, led by UC San Diego) is developing a fully autonomous, open-sourcetool chain for digital SoC layout generation, focusing onthe RTL-to-GDSII phase of system-on-chip design. Thus,OpenROAD holistically attacks the multiple facets of today’s design costcrisis: engineering resources, design tool licenses, project schedule,and risk.

The IDEA program targets no-human-in-loop (NHIL) design, with 24-hourturnaround time and zero loss of power-performance-area (PPA) design quality.

The NHIL target requires tools to adapt and auto-tune successfully to flowcompletion, without (or, with minimal) human intervention. Machineintelligence augments human expertise through efficient modeling andprediction of flow and optimization outcomes throughout the synthesis, placementand routing process. This is complemented by development of metricsand machine learning infrastructure.

The 24-hour runtime target implies that problems must be strategicallydecomposed throughout the design process, with clustered and partitionedsubproblems being solved and recomposed through intelligent distributionand management of computational resources. This ensures that the NHIL designoptimization is performed within its available[threads*hours] “box” ofresources. Decomposition that enables parallel and distributed search overcloud resources incurs a quality-of-results loss, but this is subsequentlyrecovered through improved flow predictability and enhanced optimization.

For a technical description of the OpenROAD flow, please refer to our DAC-2019 paper:Toward an Open-Source Digital Flow: First Learnings from the OpenROAD Project.The paper is also available fromACM Digital Library.Other publications and presentations arelinkedhere.