ece 260c. (Beta)

About This Course #

ECE 260C, as run in the Spring 2025 academic quarter, is UC San Diego’s attempt at building a course based on OpenROAD and IHP130, as well as other open-source EDA tools. This course was showcased at the 62DAC Open-Source EDA BoF and at FSiC2025. Please take a look at the slides there for more information on course planning and success measures.

Original Course Description

State-of-the-art physical design methodologies are required to deliver the next generation of high-performance, high-efficiency chips. In this course, students will look beyond the standard VLSI RTL-to-GDS2 flow by learning how to apply complex scripting. At the same time, a new revolution in open-source EDA tools will allow students to both understand and modify the internals of the tools to achieve more than was previously possible. Students will learn to apply these methodologies with a backdrop of modern SoC design.

About This Release #

This site allows you to access permissively licensed course content, based on the material built during the Spring ‘25 quarter. A limited amount of course content is currently released, with more coming in the future.

The content will continuously evolve as we:

• identify more opportunities to showcase rapidly advancing open EDA tools,
• polish slides,
• add speaker’s notes, and
• tune the contents of labs.

For best results, you may wish to copy out the course contents you need as links and contents therein may not persist.

Course material can be found in the sidebar. Please be sure to review the licensing information.

Questions? Problems? #

For issues with course contents, please file a GitHub issue in the ece260c-contents repo.

For issues with tooling, please file a GitHub issue in the ece260c-tools repo.

For other inquiries, feel free to send an email to Davit Markarian at dtmar@ucsd.edu.