OpenLane

OpenLane is an automated RTL to GDSII flow based on a number of components including OpenROAD, Yosys, Magic, Netgen, CVC, SPEF-Extractor, KLayout and a number of custom scripts for design exploration and optimization.

The flow performs all ASIC implementation steps from RTL all the way down to GDSII. Currently, it supports both A and B variants of the sky130 PDK, the C variant of the gf180mcu PDK, and instructions to add support for other (including proprietary) PDKs are documented.

OpenLane abstracts the underlying open source utilities, and allows users to configure all their behavior with just a single configuration file.

You can check out the detailed documentation, including in-depth guides and reference manuals at ReadTheDocs.

Quick-start Guide

If you just want to try OpenLane out, try this Colaboratory by our friends at Google and ChipsAlliance. It's an online Python-based utility, and the best part is, you don't need to install anything.

Installation, The Short Version

To install the OpenLane environment.

• On Windows, install and launch the Windows Subsystem for Linux before doing anything. We recommend and provide instructions for Ubuntu 20.04.
• On macOS, get brew.

Then:

1. Get Docker (or a compatible container engine)
   • On Ubuntu, follow the Docker post install instructions after you install Docker.
2. Get Python 3.6 or higher (macOS | Ubuntu)
   • On Ubuntu, you may also need to install venv: apt-get install python3-venv
3. Get git (macOS | Ubuntu)
4. Get GNU Make (macOS | Ubuntu)

Run the following commands in your command-line prompt:

cd $HOME
git clone https://github.com/The-OpenROAD-Project/OpenLane
cd OpenLane
make
make test

If everything's gone smoothly, OpenLane is now set up on your computer. To enter the OpenLane environment:

cd $HOME/OpenLane
make mount

Installation, The Long Version

See the installation docs at https://openlane.readthedocs.io/en/latest/getting_started/installation/index.html.

Usage

After entering the OpenLane environment, you can start hardening chips: the following command, for example, runs the included spm design.

./flow.tcl -design spm

Need more help?

Please join the Open Source Silicon Slack where you can ask thousands of other open source hardware enthusiasts for help with setting up or running OpenLane.

Publication

If you use OpenLane in your research, please cite the following paper.

• M. Shalan and T. Edwards, “Building OpenLANE: A 130nm OpenROAD-based Tapeout-Proven Flow: Invited Paper,” 2020 IEEE/ACM International Conference On Computer Aided Design (ICCAD), San Diego, CA, USA, 2020, pp. 1-6. Paper

@INPROCEEDINGS{9256623,
  author={Shalan, Mohamed and Edwards, Tim},
  booktitle={2020 IEEE/ACM International Conference On Computer Aided Design (ICCAD)}, 
  title={Building OpenLANE: A 130nm OpenROAD-based Tapeout- Proven Flow : Invited Paper}, 
  year={2020},
  volume={},
  number={},
  pages={1-6},
  doi={}}

License

The Apache License, version 2.0.

Docker images distributed by Efabless Corporation under the same license.

Binaries in OpenLane distributions may fall under stricter open source licenses.