Disrupting Conventional Chip Design through the Open Source EDA Ecosystem

Today’s open-source chip development ecosystem relies on various Electronic Design Automation (EDA) tools, accessible through permissive licenses on GitHub [1] – [3]. As the open-source chip design ecosystem matures, the EDA tool maintainers gradually incorporate customized features to boost the user’s experience. Such is the case of OpenFASoC, an Open-Source, Fully Autonomous SoC Synthesis tool that uses customizable Cell-Based Synthesizable Analog Circuits. This process-agnostic tool delivers, through different alternatives, a framework of integrated open-source tools capable of synthesizing highly optimized, verifiable analog blocks ready for tape-out with reproducible results [4]. The tool also boasts a cloud-based Continuous Integration (CI) framework that allows developers to continually collaborate and improve the tool while staying on the latest version.