The OpenROAD project: status and paths forward
- Speaker: Andrew B. Kahng
- Affiliation: UCSD VLSI CAD Laboratory
- email: abk@ucsd.edu
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Abstract
OpenROAD (https://theopenroadproject.org/) continues to see accelerated usage for research, product design, and educational purposes -- in both academic and commercial contexts. Technical advances in clock tree synthesis, physical synthesis and operator mapping, and other areas have significantly improved stability and quality of results, and are complemented by scaling levers such as GPU acceleration and cloud-based autotuning. These advances steadily expand product design use cases, such as architectural/RTL design space exploration and block floorplan/PPA optimization, along with sustaining R&D and business models. Availability in open source has made OpenROAD increasingly attractive for academic research in both EDA and IC design – as well as for academic contests, chip design courses, and design education infrastructure. This is particularly true in AI and machine learning, where the project offers a unique testbed for open data and innovation. My talk will review these and other aspects of OpenROAD’s current status, along with paths forward.
Speaker biography
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Andrew B. Kahng is Distinguished Professor of CSE and ECE and holder of the endowed chair in high-performance computing at UC San Diego. He was visiting scientist at Cadence (1995-97) and founder/CTO at Blaze DFM (2004-06). He is coauthor of 3 books and over 500 journal and conference papers, holds 35 issued U.S. patents, and is a fellow of ACM and IEEE. He was the 2019 Ho-Am Prize laureate in Engineering. He has served as general chair of IEEE CEDA-sponsored conferences such as DAC, ISPD, SLIP and MLCAD, and from 2000-2016 served as international chair/co-chair of the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (ITRS) Design and System Drivers working groups. He was the principal investigator of the U.S. DARPA “OpenROAD” project (https://theopenroadproject.org/) from June 2018 to December 2023, and until August 2023 served as principal investigator and director of “TILOS” (https://tilos.ai/), a U.S. NSF AI Research Institute.