markdown/gh_discussions/Feature Request/4422.md

Creating an FEOL Class in OpenROAD

Subcategory: FEOL integration

Conversation

chetanyagoyal

This is in regard to https://github.com/chipsalliance/ideas/blob/main/gsoc-2023-ideas.md#create-feol-classes-in-openroad-and-a-gds-writer, a GSoC project proposed in 2023. I would like to take this up for 2024's run of GSoC, and was wondering what the project entails. For reference, I have been contributing to OpenFASoC for a large part of the year and have good knowledge of their codebase, and some knowledge of OpenROAD-flow-scripts

maliberty

@msaligane was the mentor in 2023 so it would be good to get his input. I expect the hardest part would be dealing with hierarchy (aref/sref) as OR's odb is rather flat in its lef/def orientation. New layers shouldn't be too hard. The rest of the system will have to be more aware of them and the GUI will need some updating.

I would be good to have a specific use case beyond just read/write gds. There should be some value added by doing it in OR as opposed to klayout or gdsfactory.

stefanottili

Having openroad write gds/oas would be useful, because it reduces the file size compared to odb.

But I would recommend not to duplicate the ability to read and collect all the gds/oas pieces coming from various other sources. This functionality already exists in strm2oas.

msaligane

We have been looking into this in the previous GSOC. Hopefully, this project gets approved for Chetanya to finish the project.