Developed with funding from DARPA MTO’s Intelligent Design of Electronic Assets (IDEA) program, OpenROAD provides Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) and System on Chip (SoC) design teams with an open source, no-human-in-loop, 24-hour chip place-and-route solution. OpenROAD’s value proposition is that it brings down the barriers of cost, expertise and unpredictability of proprietary solutions which currently block semiconductor creators and innovators.
To date, OpenROAD has been used on over 600 tapeouts, on process nodes down to 12nm. Because of its ease-of-use, a growing number of companies have also started to use OpenROAD up front in the development process, during hardware and software architectural exploration. Doing predictive architectural exploration is especially valuable when testing revolutionary new architectures and algorithms where empirical power, performance, and area (PPA) data do not exist.
As commercial processes have become highly proprietary, open predictive technology models available as public PDKS along with OpenROAD’s integrated RTL-GDSII flow, can fill the reliable estimation gap long before detailed design, enabling clear visibility into PPA tradeoffs. For example, the ASAP7 open source 7 nm FinFET PDK, supported by OpenROAD includes abstract models for schematic and layout entry, library characterization, synthesis, placement and routing, parasitic extraction, and HSPICE simulation.
Precision Innovations Inc. (PII) is the primary industrial developer of OpenROAD providing custom support for the main applications, flows and PDKS for a simple, barrier-free use of design exploration and subsequent implementation in OpenROAD.
Recently PII partnered with Ascenium to provide dedicated support for design estimation using OpenROAD flow and ASAP7 to streamline Ascenium’s quest to deliver a new class of a low power, General Purpose Processor, without an instruction set, through an optimized compiler interface. “The exponential influx of data (video, audio, sensor) accelerated by Deep Learning and 5G increases the importance of compute efficiency for energy management.” Said Øyvind Harboe, VP of Engineering at Ascenium. “By leveraging OpenROAD as we explore architectures, get rapid feedback to make important and reliable hardware and software trade offs early in the design cycle before we commit to physical implementation at a fraction of the cost from using commercial tools. If you are someone who hankers to work on something insanely great, something different, – that can change the industry, leveraging open-source tools, such as LLVM or OpenROAD, then please check out the career opportunities at our website, www.ascenium.com.”
If you too would like to talk with PII about dedicated support for your projects, please contact info@precisioninno.com
