Building a Collaborative Open‑Source EDA Community: Research, Upskilling and Industrial Engagement

Speaker

Christian Pilato
Associate Professor at Politecnico di Milano.

Title
"Building a Collaborative Open‑Source EDA Community: Research, Upskilling and Industrial Engagement "

Abstract

Modern chip design still relies on costly, proprietary tools, limiting access for students, researchers, and start-ups. Even when open tools exist, they are often fragmented and hard to integrate, and only a small community has real tape-out experience. Open-source EDA is beginning to reduce these barriers and democratize advanced chip design.

The Open Design Environment for European Chips initiative addresses this gap by delivering an open, reproducible digital SoC flow from high-level synthesis and SoC definition down to GDSII. It integrates mature open-source tools for HLS, synthesis, place-and-route, timing, and verification into a unified, automated pipeline targeting 65-28nm technologies, enabling systematic exploration of power, performance, and area trade-offs from architecture to physical layout.

The initiative is built on three pillars: research, upskilling, and industrial engagement. It supports reproducible experimentation and validation of new methods on real silicon targets; provides hands-on training to build practical RTL-to-GDSII expertise; and connects academia and industry within a shared open framework to accelerate prototyping and strengthen the talent pipeline.

About Speaker

Christian Pilato is an Associate Professor at Politecnico di Milano. He received his Ph.D. in Information Technology from Politecnico di Milano in 2011. He was a Postdoctoral Researcher at Columbia University and the University of Lugano, and a Visiting Researcher at New York University, TU Delft, and Chalmers University of Technology. His research focuses on chip and digital SoC design, heterogeneous architectures, memory systems, and hardware security. He has led several open-source EDA initiatives fostering collaboration between academia and industry, and he is a leader of the Open Design Environment for European Chips initiative.

He was the Scientific Coordinator of the H2020 EVEREST project. He was the Scientific Coordinator of the H2020 EVEREST project. He has served as Program Chair for EUC 2014, ICCD 2022 and 2023, and SAMOS XXIII and XXIV, and as General Chair of ICCD 2024. He is an Associate Editor of IEEE TCAD, a Senior Member of IEEE and ACM, a member of HiPEAC and DISCOVER-US, and currently Chair of the ACM SIGDA Executive Committee (2024-2027).