OpenDRC: An Efficient Open-Source Design Rule Checking Engine with Hierarchical GPU Acceleration
Zhuolun He, Yihang Zuo, Jiaxi Jiang, Haisheng Zheng, Yuzhe Ma, Bei Yu
Abstract
Design rule checking (DRC) is an essential procedure in physical verification, yet few open-source DRC tools are accessible in academia. To fill in the gap, we present OpenDRC, an open-source DRC engine that aims for extremely high efficiency. OpenDRC maintains hierarchical layouts with layer-wise bounding volume hierarchies and performs adaptive row-based partition to identify independent regions for check pruning and/or parallel processing. For common design rules, OpenDRC provides a sequential mode that runs cell-level sweeplines, and a parallel mode that launches edge-based GPU check kernels. Experiments demonstrate that OpenDRC outperforms state-of-the-art multi-threading and GPU-accelerated design rule checkers. The source code is available at https://github.com/opendrc/opendrc.