Survey of Open-source Flows for Digital Hardware Design

Abstract

This paper considers open-source tools for the logical-synthesis and place-and-route hardware design stages. Several flows (CADs), including qFlow, OpenLANE, Coriolis, VTR, and SymbiFlow, have been described. For experimental evaluation of these flows, two RISC-V implementations have been used: schoolRISCV and PicoRV32. The results show that open-source flows are capable to produce physical layouts for realistic examples. At the same time, commercial CADs allow generating more effective designs in terms of clock frequency.