The missing pieces of open design enablement
Tim Ansell, Mehdi Saligane
Abstract
In an initiative to advance the open-source electronic design automation (EDA) and hardware design community, Google has been spearheading a global collaborative effort involving investigators from academia, start-ups as well as foundries. Open-source silicon being the end goal, multiple blossoming projects are supported to drive the renewed open-source wave to break down the barriers of EDA tooling and ultimately hardware design. This push toward the democratization of hardware also aims to develop and release an open-source platform of silicon-proven analog and digital IP blocks to serve as a foundation for rapid design of complex, secure systems-on-chip (SoCs) at bleeding edge technology nodes. This paper details the different efforts that constitute the missing pieces standing in the way of open design enablement such as: OpenROAD for EDA tooling, digital libraries such as OpenRAM and standard cells, and finally analog and mixed-signal (AMS) building blocks for SoCs such as: BAG and FASoC.