OpenROAD

Table Of Contents

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. OpenROAD aims to bring down the barriers of cost, expertise and unpredictability that currently block designers’ access to hardware implementation in advanced technologies. The project team (Qualcomm, Arm and multiple universities and partners, led by UC San Diego) is developing a fully autonomous, open-source tool chain for digital layout generation across die, package and board, with initial focus on the RTL-to-GDSII phase of system-on-chip design. Thus, OpenROAD holistically attacks the multiple facets of today’s design cost crisis: engineering resources, design tool licenses, project schedule, and risk.

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

The NHIL target requires tools to adapt and auto-tune successfully to flow completion without or with significantly minimal human intervention. Machine intelligence augments human expertise through efficient modeling and prediction of flow outcomes during layout generation.

24 hours runtime target implies that problems must be strategically decomposed into optimal partitions during the design process through intellgient distribution and management of computational resources. This ensures that the design constraints are met for schedule, performance and cost. Any quality loss due to decomposition that uses a parallel and distributed search over cloud resources, is subsequently recovered through improved flow predictability and enhanced optimization.

For a technical description of the OpenROAD flow, please refer to our DAC paper: Toward an Open-Source Digital Flow: First Learnings from the OpenROAD Project. Also, available from ACM Digital Library.

How to navigate this documentation

• If you are a user, start with the Getting Started guide, and then move on to the User Guide.
• If you are willing to contribute, see the Getting Involved section.
• If you are a developer with EDA background, learn more about how you can use OpenROAD as the infrastructure for your tools in the Developer Guide section.

See FAQs and Capabilities/Limitations for relevant background on the project.

How to get in touch

We maintain the following channels for communication:

• Project homepage and news: https://theopenroadproject.org
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/OpenROAD_EDA
• Issues and bugs: https://github.com/The-OpenROAD-Project/OpenROAD/issues
• Gitter Community: https://gitter.im/The-OpenROAD-Project/community
• Inquiries: openroad@eng.ucsd.edu

Site Map

Contents:

• Getting Started
  • Prerequisites
  • Get the tools
    • Option 1: build from sources using Docker
    • Option 2: Build from sources locally
  • Designs
    • Adding a New Design
  • Platforms
    • Adding a New Platform
  • Implement the Design
  • Miscellaneous
    • tiny-tests - easy to add, single concern, single Verilog file
    • nangate45 smoke-test harness for top level Verilog designs
• User Guide
  • Code Organization
  • Setup
  • Using the flow
    • Logic Synthesis
    • Initialize Floorplan
    • Gate Resizer
    • Timing Analysis
    • MacroPlace
    • Tapcell
    • Global Placement
    • Detailed Placement
    • Clock Tree Synthesis
    • Global Routing
    • Detailed Routing
• Capabilities/Limitations
  • Global Considerations
  • Supported Platforms
  • Design Partitioning and Logic Synthesis
  • STA
  • Floorplan
  • Placement
  • Clock Tree Synthesis
  • Routing
  • Layout Finishing and Final Verifications
• Developer Guide
  • Tool Philosophy
  • Tool File Organization
  • Initialization (c++ tools only)
  • Commands
  • Errors
  • Test
  • Builds
  • Tool Work Flow
  • Example of Adding a Tool to OpenRoad
  • Documentation
  • Tool Flow
  • Tool Checklist
• Coding Practices
  • C++
    • Practice #1
    • Practice #2
    • Practice #3
    • Practice #4
    • Practice #5
    • Practice #6
    • Practice #7
    • Practice #8
    • Practice #9
    • Practice #10
    • Practice #11
    • Practice #12
    • Practice #13
    • Practice #14
    • Practice #15
    • Practice #16
    • Practice #17
    • Practice #18
    • Practice #19
    • Practice #20
    • Practice #21
    • Practice #22
    • Practice #23
    • Practice #24
    • Practice #25
    • Practice #26
    • Practice #27
    • Practice #28
    • Practice #29
    • Practice #30
    • Practice #34
    • Practice #35
  • Git
    • Practice #31
    • Practice #32
    • Practice #33
  • CMAKE
    • Practice #35
    • Practice #36
    • Practice #37
• Database Math 101
• Getting Involved
  • Licensing Contributions
  • Contributing Open Source PDK information and Designs
  • Contributing Scripts and Code
  • Questions
• Using the logging infrastructure
  • Message Types
    • Report
    • Debug
    • Information
    • Warning
    • Error
    • Critical
  • Coding
    • Debug Messages
  • Metrics
  • Converting to Logger
• FAQs
  • Where can I download OpenROAD tools?
  • How can I contribute?

Table Of Contents

• Welcome to OpenROAD’s documentation!
  • How to navigate this documentation
  • How to get in touch
  • Site Map

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Getting Started