Industrial Experience with Open-Source EDA Tools

Commonly, the design flow of integrated circuits from initial specifications to fabrication employs commercial, proprietary Electronic Design Automation (EDA) tools. While these tools deliver high-quality, production-ready results, they can be seen as expensive black boxes and thus, are not suited for research and academic purposes. Innovations on the field are mostly focused on optimizing the quality of the results of the designs by modifying core elements of the tool chain or using techniques of the Machine Learning (ML) domain. In both cases, researchers require many or long runs of EDA tools for comparing results or generating training data for ML models. Using proprietary, commercial tools in those cases may be either not affordable or not possible at all.