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Quickstart: Run gcd on nangate45 with Docker

This guide runs the smallest ORFS smoke test -- the gcd design on the nangate45 platform -- from RTL to GDS using the pre-built Docker image. No local compilation is required.

For the full RTL-to-GDS walkthrough with interactive examples, see the Flow Tutorial.

Prerequisites

  • Docker installed and running (Docker Desktop with WSL integration on Windows)
  • At least 1 CPU core and 8 GB RAM (4 cores recommended)
  • A clone of OpenROAD-flow-scripts

One-time setup: pull the Docker image

Downloading the image is separate from running the flow. Do this once:

docker pull openroad/orfs:latest

Run the flow

From the root of your OpenROAD-flow-scripts clone:

cd flow
util/docker_shell make

The Makefile defaults to DESIGN_CONFIG=./designs/nangate45/gcd/config.mk, so no extra flags are needed for this quickstart.

To select the design explicitly:

util/docker_shell make DESIGN_CONFIG=./designs/nangate45/gcd/config.mk

On success, make prints a stage summary table at the end. For gcd, the total runtime is typically under five minutes on a modern machine. A full clean run on WSL2 with Docker Desktop completed in about one minute in our verification (see Verified environment below).

Expected output

Final layout files are written under the base flow variant:

Artifact Path
GDSII results/nangate45/gcd/base/6_final.gds
DEF results/nangate45/gcd/base/6_final.def
Logs logs/nangate45/gcd/base/

Confirm the GDS exists:

ls -lh results/nangate45/gcd/base/6_final.gds

Optional: view the layout in the GUI

If you have an X11 display available (for example, WSLg on Windows 11):

util/docker_shell make gui_final

This opens the finished layout in the OpenROAD GUI. It is not required to validate that the flow completed successfully.

Troubleshooting

xauth warnings when running headless

When no graphical display is available, util/docker_shell may print xauth warnings. These can be ignored for make; they do not affect RTL-to-GDS execution.

Image not found

If Docker reports that openroad/orfs:latest is missing, run:

docker pull openroad/orfs:latest

Re-running from scratch

To remove previous results for this design and run all stages again:

util/docker_shell make clean_all
util/docker_shell make

Next steps

Verified environment

This quickstart was verified with:

  • OS: WSL2 (Linux)
  • Docker: Docker Desktop 28.4.0
  • Image: openroad/orfs:latest
  • Command: util/docker_shell make DESIGN_CONFIG=./designs/nangate45/gcd/config.mk
  • Full clean run (make clean_all then make): ~61 seconds wall time
  • Output: results/nangate45/gcd/base/6_final.gds present