Bridging Academic Open-Source EDA to Real-World Usability

Several academic EDA tools have been released; however, few are used in real tapeouts, even by other academics. Robust open-source tools require feedback and direction from users. To this end, Open-ROAD employs end-users as internal design advisors who bring with them the experience of multiple tapeouts and EDA tool flow development. This paper discusses the OpenROAD design advisors' ongoing work to bring OpenROAD from a collection of tools to an end-to-end autonomous design flow. We discuss our work to fill in the gaps for a full RTL-to-GDS design flow, assemble a full-flow test suite reflective of real tapeouts, debug flow-level issues between tools, and bridge the gap between OpenROAD developers and others in the open-source community. Lastly, we discuss OpenROAD's long-term goal to become fully autonomous, and what that means from a user's perspective.