OpenROAD Project

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The OpenROAD Project (Open Realization of Autonomous Design) is a major open-source project that aims to provide a fully automated, end-to-end digital integrated circuit design flow (RTL-to-GDSII), thereby eliminating the need for human intervention. OpenROAD was started in 2018 to address the high cost, inexperience, and unpredictability of conventional EDA tools as part of DARPA's IDEA initiative. It achieves this by enabling a 24-hour, no-human-in-loop (NHIL) flow that matches the usual quality of design and produces layouts suitable for GDSII. Leading a cooperation under a permissive BSD license, UC San Diego keeps OpenROAD available. Among the business partners are Arm, Qualcomm, SkyWater, and others. Among its main features are scripting interfaces (Tcl/Python) and a common database (OpenDB), which help designers automate or personalize every phase of the digital design process. The project aims to democratize hardware design and promote rapid innovation in integrated circuit (IC) design by reducing barriers related to cost, time, and experience.Projects using the flow range from Hammer at the University of California, Berkeley, to the FASoC analog/mixed-signal flow to the Zero-ASIC Silicon Compiler. Readymade open ASIC flows, including OpenLane and OpenROAD flow scripts, are based on this.^[1][2]