Contributions to OpenROAD from Abroad: Experiences and Learnings : Invited Paper

The OpenROAD project is an ambitious initiative seeking to develop an automated, open-source RTL-to-GDSII flow. To build its complex toolset, OpenROAD brings together a team of industry experts, veteran scholars, and enthusiastic students from different schools and different countries. This paper first presents our path to becoming OpenROAD contributors, highlighting the nature of the OpenROAD project, the recruitment process, and the necessary logistics. We then summarize the contributions of the Brazilian team to the OpenROAD project; these comprise the development of five tools and more than 10K lines of released code, along with authorship or co-authorship of two publications in the research literature. We also summarize our experiences from working in a large software project: (i) working environment and relationship with people from around the world; (ii) task management and short turnaround times; (iii) continuous integration and testing; etc. Finally, we highlight the challenges of “refurbishing” academic research codes for use in the design of production ICs.