Also, have you checked out the OpenROAD[1] project? It’s a pretty impressive open source RTL to GDSII flow.
I went to their most recent meetup at DAC’24 and there’s a great community around the project.
I'd love to but what do you want me to elaborate on?
We started making EDA tools and simulators (CAD, SYM FAB as Alan Kay says) and designing a wafer scale integration to run parallel Squeak Smalltalk (David Ungar's ROARVM) in 2007 and we are still working on it in 2024 so I estimate 30,000 hours now. I call that very ambitious too.
>Also, have you checked out the OpenROAD[1] project? It’s a pretty impressive
No it is not pretty impressive EDA software, OpenROAD software quality is like Linux, " a budget of bad ideas" as Alan Kay typifies it. Openroad is decades old sequential program code, millions of lines of ancient C, C++ and bits of Python programs written in the very low level C language, riddled with bugs and pathes. The tools are bolted together with primitive scripts and very finicky configurations and parametric rules. Not that the commercial proprietary EDA software is any better, that usually is even worse but because you don't see the source code you can't see the underlying mess.
Good EDA tools should be written by just a few expert programmers and scientists in just a few thousand lines of code and run on a supercomputer.
So the first ambitous goal is to learn how to write better software (than the current dozens of millions of lines of EDA software code). Alan Kay explains how [1-3]:
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubaX1Smg6pY
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kj4fLRm2UC4
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1e8VZlPBx_0
The second ambitous goal is to (learn to) design ultra low power transistor and free space optics. Learn from the best quantum physicists: [4].
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dQoImLNgWs
The biggest problem is you need to get a couple of million investment just to test your software with a few tape-outs.
I only managed to invest the money for the 30,000 hours of labour so far, you can guess how many millions that's worth.