POSE: Phase II: Growing a Collaborative Ecosystem for Open-Source Chip Design Using OpenROAD

Semiconductor chips are at the heart of nearly all modern technology, from smartphones to medical devices. However, designing these chips is complex, expensive, and dependent on proprietary software, making it difficult for students, researchers, and small companies to innovate. OpenROAD, a free, open-source electronic design automation (EDA) tool, makes chip design faster, cheaper, and more accessible to a wider community of companies, researchers, and students. Open-source EDA tools such as OpenROAD lower barriers to innovation of new hardware systems that are vital for the long-term economic health and national security of the U.S. OpenROAD has been used successfully to design hundreds of chips across a wide range of technologies, and is widely used in education and research. By creating a strong, sustainable open-source ecosystem (OSE) around OpenROAD, this project helps to ensure that the U.S. maintains its leadership in semiconductor design and system innovation. The project creates new opportunities and pathways for education and workforce training, preparing more people for careers in chip design and supporting local semiconductor manufacturing efforts. With funding from the Pathways to Enable Open-Source Ecosystems program (POSE), the OpenROAD Initiative provides the vehicle for building a managing organization and governance structure for a self-sustaining and robust OpenROAD open-source ecosystem. Project goals include the support of open-source EDA tool integration for flexible design flows and the deployment of software distribution infrastructure to improve chip design efficiency. The project will also promote knowledge transfer and enable training at scale. The project seeks to provide pathways for developer onboarding and to foster growth of open-source EDA in adjacent domains including analog/mixed-signal design and next generation data-driven chip design flows using AI-assisted EDA. Additional project goals include developing robust security protocols, benchmarking via widely accessible open-source data, and assessing enterprise readiness to ensure OpenROAD’s wider adoption in both academic and commercial settings. The project broadens the nation’s chip design education and workforce development resources through planned partnerships with universities and industry leaders, and by aligning with government initiatives to train the next generation of chip designers and EDA innovators. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.