Democratizing Chip Design

OpenROAD™ is an open source autonomous toolchain for chip design. Go from RTL to GDSII in 24 hours with no human in the loop!

Get Started
Governed by the OpenROAD Initiative (ORI)

The Problem

Modern digital chip design relies heavily on advanced EDA tools, but complete RTL-to-GDSII design flows remain expensive, complex, and opaque. As a result:

  • Startups and new users face prohibitive barriers to entry including costs, complexity, and uncertainty.
  • Researchers cannot easily inspect, modify, or extend real design flows.
  • Educators struggle to teach complete, realistic chip design for a wide spectrum of learners using closed tools.

The OpenROAD Approach

A Digital Chip Design Toolchain

Fully automated RTL-to-GDSII flow enabling reproducible, scalable chip design with no human in the loop.

Open and Research-Driven

Developed in the open, grounded in academic research, and designed to push the state of the art in digital design automation.

A Technical Hub

Integrates multiple tools, reference flows, and benchmarks into a coherent, extensible system.

Foundation for innovative AI/LLM based chip design

OpenROAD provides the open infrastructure enabling the next generation of AI-driven EDA workflows.

Strategic Design Space Exploration (DSE)

Remove traditional runtime and licensing bottlenecks to enable fast, breadth-first exploration of architectural tradeoffs, accelerating design cycles and reducing both costs and engineering risk.

Native Machine Learning Infrastructure

Leverage Python APIs and ML-friendly formats like CircuitOps to enable direct execution of reinforcement learning within the EDA loop.

LLM-Guided, Multi-Objective Optimization

AI agents can use semantic-aware search and natural language constraints to optimize the design space faster than traditional flows.

Impact

Expanding Access and lowering costs of Chip Design

1000+ runs and completed chip designs have used OpenROAD-based flows across a range of technology nodes from 180nm down to 12nm.

Chip layout

ETH Zurich Tapeouts based on OpenROAD

RISC-V uLinux SoC

12nm RISC-V uLinux SoC Layout

Research & Innovation

500+ peer-reviewed research publications and conference papers have referenced or used OpenROAD. It’s advancing AI and LLM-based design methodologies, and creating datasets useful for benchmarking..

From the Community

"OpenROAD has transformed how we approach design space exploration (DSE). What once relied on intuition can now be done systematically, at scale, and at lower cost. Used in conjunction with ASAP7 PDK, SPEC2017, Ramulator, OpenROAD allows us to explore many more design options and clearly understand tradeoffs in performance, area, and energy. We can evaluate early microarchitectural choices and connect realistic workloads and memory behavior directly to physical design outcomes with confidence in their correlation to final results. This level of insight is difficult to achieve with commercial tools alone, and it is essential for reducing risk and building competitive, well-balanced architectures with a winning GTM strategy for our next-generation of general purpose processors."

Øyvind Harbøe

VP of Engineering, Ascenium

"We use open-source silicon tools in our AI-enabled chip design copilots, which are licensed by Fortune 500 companies and chip unicorns. Tools, such as OpenSTA, provide physics-accurate grounding and enable close collaboration with world-class engineers, allowing AI-based chip design methodologies to innovate rapidly, scale efficiently, and benefit from continuous improvements across the broader chip design community."

Akash Levy

CTO, Silimate

"IIT Guwahati has been at the forefront of open-source–based education and product innovation for the domestic market. Since 2023, we have been using OpenROAD to deliver large-scale skilling and faculty development programs, training more than 3,000 students in chip design to date. We are now expanding our government-funded skilling initiatives to include new domains such as analog and mixed-signal design and AI-based design methodologies, using OpenROAD and other open-source tools, to reach previously underserved student communities across India. OpenROAD is also an important part of our product development efforts at NINE Labs, as well as other RISC-V–based product initiatives supported by the Government of India."

Prof. Gaurav Trivedi

EEE Department, IIT Guwahati

"FOSS tooling like OpenROAD will be incredibly important for these efforts… I fully expect students to use this experience to form a hardware startup."

Austin Rovinski

Assistant Professor and OpenROAD user in education

"OpenROAD-based SoC design tools with permissive licensing provide key advantages of open, collaborative, rapid design turn-around with security features and easy code access that align well with Abacus Semiconductor’s design and development principles."

Alex Kloth

Abacus Semiconductor

"OpenROAD enabled me to design my first chip and go on to create the Zero to ASIC course and Tiny Tapeout. Together these platforms have enabled over 3000 people to tapeout their first chips. It’s difficult to imagine open source silicon without OpenROAD."

Matt Venn

Founder of TinyTapeout and open-source Visionary

Stay Updated

Subscribe to our newsletter for the latest updates and news!