As a long-time contributor to the OpenROAD Project, Antmicro has officially joined the OpenROAD Initiative to advance open source silicon design and enable a collaborative and fully transparent digital design ecosystem. Alongside industry and academia members including Google, Precision Innovations, and UC San Diego, Antmicro will continue to develop, maintain and improve open source digital design tooling, enabling fast turnaround design feedback and increasing productivity of silicon teams.
Bringing transparency and accessibility to chip design
The OpenROAD Initiative (ORI) is a nonprofit public benefit corporation, dedicated to the stewardship, governance, and growth of the open source digital design tooling ecosystem, which strongly aligns with Antmicro’s strategy and long-term objectives focused on bringing the benefits of open source tools and workflows to the chip design space. By bringing together members from both industry and academia, ORI aims to not only advance the open source chip development process, but also ensure transparency and accessibility.
With Antmicro lending its expertise in the areas of open source FPGA and ASIC tooling, architectural exploration, and silicon prototyping, ORI will expand the OpenROAD ecosystem, focusing on long-term sustainability and reproducibility.
“As a longtime technical contributor to the OpenROAD project, Antmicro has consistently proven their commitment to advancing the open source ASIC design tools ecosystem. We’re excited to officially welcome their open source hardware and software expertise to the OpenROAD Initiative as we work together to accelerate our shared vision: making chip design open and accessible to all,” said Aaron Cunningham, representing Google in the ORI Governing Board.
“Antmicro is excited to support OpenROAD Initiative in order to enable unprecedented, open innovation in silicon design,” said Michael Gielda, Co-Founder and VP Business Development at Antmicro. “With a long history of assisting silicon customers in improving productivity and enabling innovation in silicon design flows by building on open source tooling, we are dedicated to expedite those possibilities for both established vendors and emerging silicon startups.”
Facilitating OpenROAD-based flows
The OpenROAD ASIC development toolchain, ORI’s flagship project originally launched in 2018 by UC San Diego as a DARPA-backed project, provides tools and flows for RTL-to-GDSII design, and has already resulted in many successful tapeouts. By enabling automated architectural exploration and prototyping of silicon, OpenROAD strives to lower the entry barriers for efficient chip development.
For a while now Antmicro has been helping early adopters of OpenROAD-based flows in projects such as SkyWater Shuttle and Google’s XLS toolchain. As interest in the toolchain and its industrial use grow, Antmicro has been supporting customers by improving OpenROAD’s performance and introducing new features, especially for large and complex designs. These include improving execution time, implementing automatic clock gating and improving resynthesis. By joining ORI, Antmicro doubles down on its commitment to the open source-driven innovation in the digital design space and the OpenROAD ecosystem as a whole.
Accelerating open source-driven chip design, from prototype to tapeout
Building on a solid foundation of transparent governance and community-driven development, ORI sets out to deliver a collaborative and accessible ecosystem that will scale up as the project progresses. With OpenROAD’s existing history of successful tapeouts, Antmicro and other members will collaborate to grow and promote the toolchain across academia, industry, startups, and public agencies.
To learn more about Antmicro’s engineering services for architectural exploration and prototyping of silicon and enabling silicon tooling for enhanced productivity towards a shorter, more transparent runway to tapeout, reach out at contact@antmicro.com.
