Tutorial: Open-Source EDA and Machine Learning for IC Design: A Live Update

Open-source EDA is rapidly enabling new waves of innovation on many fronts. For academic researchers, it speeds up the lifecycle of scientific progress and makes research results relevant to modern industry practice. For EDA professionals and the industry ecosystem, open-source EDA is a complement and booster to commercial EDA. For the IC design community, recent releases under permissive licenses make it possible for design engineers as well as hobbyists to take ideas to manufacturing-ready layout at essentially zero cost.This full-day tutorial will review the very latest progress in open-source EDA, focusing on the digital RTL-to-GDS flow. In particular, the tutorial will make a deep dive into The OpenROAD Project https://theopenroadproject.org/, which brings new open-source tools and machine learning into a “no human in the loop” RTL-to-GDS flow. OpenROAD’s key components will be reviewed, along with how the overall system is architected. Here, we will provide live / hands-on demos on using the OpenROAD flow and integrating it into existing design flows. We will then turn to industry-compatible open-source infrastructure, and then demonstrate how OpenROAD’s continuous integration (CI) system works in order to welcome new contributions and give a low-overhead start for design tool and methodology innovation. Importantly, open-source EDA and the goal of “self-driving”, no-humans IC design puts a spotlight on machine learning that reduces design effort and schedule. We will show examples of important machine learning use cases and proof points in the RTL-to-GDS flow, along with demos of an open-source, freely portable integrated metrics collection system.The target audience of this tutorial includes EDA researchers and developers, graduate students and professors, and IC design methodologists, physical design engineers, and managers. Whether you are a veteran in EDA / IC design or just starting a career, the tutorial will give a new perspective and a roadmap to use and contribute to open-source EDA.