Efabless & OpenROAD Advance Commercial Open Source Chip Design

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- July 29, 2021 -- Efabless and the OpenROAD project are excited to announce combining their efforts to work closer together to advance and democratize chip design. Moving forward OpenROAD will adopt Efabless’ OpenLane as the flow of record for the OpenROAD program. This will provide users of OpenROAD a more robust flow as well as additional point tools which add value to the base OpenROAD application. Importantly, the unifying of the offerings under the OpenROAD organization will provide a single point of focus for open source development, bringing more clarity and concentration of effort to advance open source design. OpenROAD and Efabless will continue working closely together.

“Efabless has led the way in enabling the OpenROAD tool to be used for the creation of real integrated circuits,” said Andrew Kahng, principal investigator of the OpenROAD project. “Through the Efabless chipIgnite and Google-funded openMPW programs, the OpenLane flow has been used to create more than 100 designs from a wide range of users utilizing SkyWater’s SKY130 open PDK.” The OpenLane flow makes OpenROAD widely accessible to both existing chip creators and the next generation of design innovators.

“OpenROAD has been the heart of the OpenLane flow. The move strengthens the OpenLane development with the strong core competency of the OpenROAD team in the area of Electronic Design Automation (EDA) and widens the direct OpenROAD user base beyond a 100x,” said Mohamed Kassem, Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Efabless Corporation.

About Efabless

Efabless.com offers a crowd platform and marketplace for chip design that uses open source and community models to make the design and commercialization of ICs simple, inexpensive and accessible to everyone. Product developers use this platform to rapidly, cost-effectively and reliably create custom silicon. Chip developers use the solution to dramatically reduce cost and time to market for proof of concept of new and exciting ICs. Efabless is headquartered in San Jose, California. For more information, visit www.efabless.com.

About The OpenROAD Project.

OpenROAD, launched in June 2018, is developing an open source, no-human-in-the-loop RTL-to-GDS EDA system to serve researchers and system innovators across the IC design and design automation communities. Website: https://theopenroadproject.org/