The OpenROAD Project, Precision Innovations Inc. and UCSC Extension have partnered to bring the leading open source Electronic Design Automation (EDA) tools from OpenROAD to UCSC’s popular extension programs. This program enjoys great outreach with both industry and student enthusiasts seeking to grow and enhance their skill sets in high-demand areas of semiconductor and other critical technologies.
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
These offerings will significantly lower the costs of education to a large community of students, hardware designers and increasingly younger VLSI learners. Open source technologies are rapidly becoming mainstream and now an important part of the semiconductor design industry and ecosystem. These initiatives will go a long way in bridging the talent gap that is a major challenge to the chip industry.
UCSCext hosted a successful career fair at UCSC campus on September 29, 2022. See details here: https://www.ucsc-extension.edu/events/level-up-career-internship-fair-2022/
Students learned first-hand about the advantages and capabilities of OpenROAD.
UCSC extension has incorporated OpenROAD based VLSI design courses in the following key domains of IC design:
- Physical design of digital and analog/mixed signal ICs
- Static timing analysis for flow and signoff validation
- The use of OpenRAM and other SRAMs for designs with embedded memories
Guest lectures are planned from September 26 to November 9 on these tracks. Industry experts from Precision Innovations offer these courses to bring both their industry experience and also the latest advances in VLSI technologies using Open EDA solutions.
Refer to this link for details on the flow capabilities and usage: https://openroad-flow-scripts.readthedocs.io/en/latest/tutorials/FlowTutorial.html
