Debug an RTL or gate-level simulation that hangs, times out, produces no output, or computes the wrong answer, without dumping logs or waveforms into context. Covers the cheapest-first ladder (which gate failed, how the run stopped, a bounded fetch trace,…
Run a measurement study on the flow and publish it as a closed, reference-only bazel-orfs pull request. Covers the two kinds of patch a study carries into OpenROAD, ORFS or yosys (instrumentation that stays on the study branch, candidate fixes carried in…
Investigate OpenROAD global-route repair_timing correctly — the grt "grind"/timeout, hold- and setup-buffer insertion. Covers why a skip-repair (fast) grt measures nothing about repair, why repair_timing must run inside global_route.tcl on the pre-GR ODB, how…
Iterate on local OpenROAD source changes against a bazel-orfs flow by building the OpenROAD checkout binary and injecting it via OPENROAD_EXE (a bring-your-own / BYO loop), instead of encoding the diff as a base64 patch swapped into the archive_override. Use…
Pre-flight an hours-long ORFS _deps / make-extract stage run (grt, place, route, SAIF) by dumping the stage's effective variables and mentally dry-running the flow TCL to confirm the code path you are testing will actually execute. Use before committing to…
Convert an .odb file into a C++ header that reconstructs the design using odb API calls. Turn a whittled .odb into a self-contained C++ unit test.
Diagnose and iterate on an OpenROAD/ORFS failure (crash, hang, race, nondeterministic result) and set up a fast edit/measure loop before you package a reproducer.
Create a copy-paste-ready GitHub issue for an OpenROAD bug. File it upstream as a git am patch + failing bazel test.