Rust for chip design algorithms and EDA software

This talk explores the use of Rust for implementing chip design algorithms and highlights its potential in electronic design automation (EDA) software. It includes a concise overview of why Rust is well-suited for EDA challenges—offering safe and efficient parallelism, fast and optimized data structures, simple serialization/deserialization, portable SIMD, and effective numerical optimization. Beyond performance, Rust also presents an opportunity to modernize and democratize open-source EDA tools, offering several advantages over C++, the current industry standard. To illustrate these benefits, the talk will showcase a toy open-source FPGA placer and FPGA legalizer written in Rust, serving as a proof-of-concept for a broader modular ecosystem for Rust-based FPGA synthesis and implementation tools.