Tom Spyrou is a long time EDA developer who has worked at large and small companies.

• In 1988 Developed QTV at VLSI technology. It was the first STA engine to be trusted to sign off devices for fabrication without timing based simulation.
• He was the original architect of PrimeTime STA algorithm.
• Manager of Cadence Common timing Engine and precursor to Open Access
• Senior technical positions at Synopsys, Cadence, Simplex, AMD, Altera and Intel.

Since 2019 he has been the Chief Architect and Technical Project Manager of OpenROAD since 2019.

We have just heard the announcement that OpenLANE will become the defacto flow for OpenROAD.

So I felt very lucky that he was willing to spend half an hour talking to us about a wide range of topics including:

• OpenROAD history & context
• What is the aim of OpenROAD
• State of the art in industry vs research
• Training the next generation of EDA developers
• Shortage of EDA developers
• Use of other PDKs besides Sky130
• Value of open source PDKs
• Roadmap and improvements: PPA
• Machine learning additions for OpenROAD
• Cloud scale compute for OpenROAD
• OpenLANE and OpenROAD collaboration announcement
• Future hopes

Watch the interview here, or catch the podcast.

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