Listening to the Community: Key Takeaways from 100+ OpenROAD user interviews

In August 2025, the US National Science Foundation’s “Pathways to Enable Open-Source Ecosystems” (POSE) program made an award (#2449356) to a team consisting of UC San Diego, Arizona State University, Brown University, and Precision Innovations to assess future needs of the OpenROAD project and create a self-sustaining management and governance structure – an open-source ecosystem – around OpenROAD.

As part of this effort, the project team participated in the NSF I-Corps for POSE program, which provided intensive training on customer discovery, ecosystem governance, and sustainability. Through the I-Corps program, the project team conducted 103 interviews with a diverse cross-section of stakeholders including academic researchers, educators, startups, large tech companies, foundries, other open source project stakeholders, and commercial EDA vendors.

These interviews, which took place during January-February 2026, provided invaluable, candid feedback. Following is a synthesis of the key themes that emerged from these discussions.

Rapid Design Space Exploration (DSE) on Advanced Nodes

A prominent trend among industrial users, both within agile hardware startups and large technology companies, is the deployment of OpenROAD as a highly parallelizable, license-free engine for early-stage design space exploration (DSE) on advanced silicon nodes (<12nm).

Rather than replacing traditional workflows entirely, OpenROAD is carving out a niche in “smart hybrid” flows. In these configurations, developers leverage OpenROAD’s zero-license constraints to run thousands of design experiments simultaneously in the cloud to identify optimal microarchitectural trade-offs (Power, Performance, and Area) before handing the winning candidates off to proprietary EDA tools for detailed layout and manufacturing. One interviewee noted that running OpenROAD continuously as an “internal decision engine” has saved their organization massive amounts of engineering and licensing overhead compared to their previous traditional flows.

OpenROAD as the Ground Truth Engine for AI/LLM Workflows

Another exciting and organic development is OpenROAD’s emerging role in AI-driven chip design. Traditional commercial EDA tools operate as proprietary “black boxes” with restrictive licensing models and other practical constraints that prevent deep, parallel integration with autonomous AI agents.

In contrast, OpenROAD’s transparent database and C++/Python APIs make it an ideal “ground truth” verification engine for AI design copilots. Pioneering companies such as Silimate and Rise Design Automation are already using OpenSTA and OpenROAD to autonomously extract timing metrics, train machine learning models, and guide design optimization without human-in-the-loop bottlenecks.

Streamlining Onboarding and Improving Usability

While removing financial barriers is a crucial first step, interviews consistently revealed that onboarding friction and usability hurdles can impede seamless deployment at scale. Three main problems were identified:

DevOps and IT Burden on Educators: Instructors and teaching assistants at universities reported spending significant time managing Docker versioning, complex Python dependencies, and platform-specific inconsistencies (such as running containers on modern ARM-based MacBooks). This operational overhead turns educators into IT support staff, presenting a significant barrier for resource-constrained or underserved institutions that lack dedicated DevOps infrastructure.
Demand for Stable Releases: Experienced developers and enterprise users requested predictable, semantic versioning (e.g., v26.1) rather than requiring developers to constantly build from a changing “master” branch.
Technical Usability Bottlenecks: Users highlighted several technical areas for improvement, including limited native hierarchy support, single-threaded performance limits on larger designs, and occasional metadata loss when transferring design data via DEF files during hybrid workflow handoffs. Periodic documentation updates are needed to explain new features, with design examples and tutorials.

Securing PDK Access and Foundry-backed Flows

Process Design Kits (PDKs) serve as the foundational building blocks of chip design, enabling critical research, design development, and technology evaluation. They influence key process-node decisions and design choices based on early QoR predictions that ultimately impact time-to-market, product performance, and engineering costs.

Limited access to modern PDKs was consistently identified as a primary barrier to broader adoption. Addressing this challenge requires deeper partnerships with leading foundries to enable support for both open and NDA-governed PDKs, open PDK versions of modern technologies along with their associated design flows, within the OpenROAD platform. At the same time, academic researchers and chip startups seek extensions of, and a high-quality successor to, the ASAP7 research PDK that the project currently maintains.

Extension into Analog and Mixed-Signal Design (AMS) domain

While OpenROAD has established itself as a mature digital design toolchain, there is a rapidly growing industry demand for analog and mixed-signal IPs. This demand is largely driven by the expansion of edge-native systems, including AI accelerators, automotive electronics, and environmental sensors that require energy-efficient, custom analog interfaces.

Currently, integrating custom analog IPs into hierarchical digital flows within OpenROAD is not well-supported, though early adopters are proving it is possible. For instance, a biomedical startup interviewed by the team recently taped out a sensor chip using OpenROAD in their mixed-signal flow, achieving substantial engineering cost savings and meeting tight schedules.

Strengthening Education and Workforce Development Initiatives

The OpenROAD ecosystem has become a cornerstone of global silicon skilling initiatives, powering university laboratories, professional workforce development efforts, and multi-project wafer (MPW) shuttles offered by platforms such as Wafer Space, ChipFoundry, and Tiny Tapeout.

However, industry experts emphasized that scaling education and workforce development programs will require a significantly larger pool of qualified instructors and mentors. This requires a structured “train-the-trainer” strategy, modular curricula, and active collaboration with educators, academic institutions, and workforce development platforms. There is also a critical need for high-quality, shareable educational resources including tutorials, documentation, reference designs, and application-focused training materials.

OpenROAD Initiative to Maintain Trust, Governance, and Financial Sustainability

Interviewees consistently highlighted that long-term sustainability requires stable, neutral, and transparent governance. The feedback received indicates that the community strongly supports the newly established OpenROAD Initiative (ORI), a nonprofit 501(c)(3) foundation, to provide this stewardship. However, the interviews also stressed that ORI must prioritize helping OpenROAD to expand its pool of active maintainers and code committers to reduce single-point-of-failure risks and build a resilient developer ecosystem. Long-term financial sustainability requires strategic industrial partnerships – especially from large semiconductor companies – and diversified revenue streams to support a large community with multiple maintainers, developers and users.

What’s Next?

The OpenROAD POSE Project Award team greatly benefited from the I-Corps training by applying tools and processes for customer discovery and thesis validation that will help ORI leadership build an effective organization for the long-term sustainability of the OpenROAD ecosystem. The project team will continue to engage the community through workshops, educational hackathons, and active communication channels to gather ongoing feedback, ensuring that developer and user voices remain at the heart of open-source EDA.

Together, we want to extend our deepest gratitude to everyone who generously shared their time, expertise, and candid perspectives. OpenROAD is successfully transitioning from an ambitious research project to a critical piece of global semiconductor infrastructure, and we’re excited to be building the future together with the community.