Towards Free, Open, and Ubiquitous Hardware Design

Moore’s Law is reaching a slow but inevitable end as transistor counts take longer and longer to double. Because chips can no longer rely on foundry improvements to improve performance, architectural innovations need to pick up the slack. Certain domains such as machine learning, genomics, graph processing, drug discovery, financial trading, and others have turned to hardware acceleration. EDA software has not seen such focus and is at risk of stagnating chip development. In this dissertation, I discuss key issues limiting the pace of innovation in hardware design, including complexity of design integration, inaccessibility of EDA tools, and lagging EDA tool performance. Then, I present three of my works which address these issues: Celerity, OpenROAD, and SpeEDAr. These works represent a multi-faceted approach to speed up design innovation by improving design methodologies, providing open-source EDA tooling, and improving end-to-end EDA tool performance.