Pushing RTL→GDSII into the commons
OpenROAD’s mission is to make advanced physical design accessible to every researcher, startup, and learner. We are building a fully autonomous, production-grade flow that anyone can audit, extend, and deploy—no expensive license walls, no black boxes.
What we focus on
- Fast, timing- and congestion-aware implementation that tracks commercial QoR.
- Automation across the stack—floorplanning, placement, CTS, routing, and signoff—in a single open-source binary.
- Reference flows, documentation, and test silicon that lower the barrier for new contributors.
Who makes it happen
The initiative is led by UC San Diego with support from a global network of universities, fabs, cloud providers, and open-source maintainers. DARPA’s ERI program provided the critical seed funding, and the community now keeps the roadmap moving.
How to engage
- Join the developer discussions and contribute optimizations.
- Bring OpenROAD into coursework, hackathons, or MPW tapeouts—tell us what you need.
- Partner with us on research collaborations, silicon validation, and ecosystem tooling.