In digital design, a circuit is described in a hardware description language (e.g. Verilog) and the goal is to manufacture it. To get the actual layout of the circuit that is manufacturable, it needs to pass through a number of steps before handing it over to a fabrication lab. In this post, we briefly give an overview of the steps and show how to perform them using open-source tools in OpenROAD™.
This post assumes that you have some background on hardware design. No programming knowledge is required to use the tools. Physical design knowledge is a plus, but not necessary. When appropriate, we give some links to Wikipedia articles to refer to.