/--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------\
| |
| Electron (originally named Proton) is a full feature hierarchical |
|. ASIC place and route system |
| Copyright (C) 2014 - 2018 efabless corporation |
| |
| This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify |
| it under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License |
| as published by the Free Software Foundation, Version 3. |
| |
| This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, |
| but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of |
| MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the |
| GNU Affero General Public License for more details. |
| |
| You should have received a copy of the GNU Affero General Public License |
| along with this program. If not, see <https://www.gnu.org/licenses/>. |
| |
| <https://github.com/efabless/proton/blob/master/LICENSE.txt/> |
| <https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.en.html/> |
| |
\--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------/
Electron is a fork of efabless/proton, a hierarchical ASIC place-and-route suite published by efabless corporation under the GNU Affero General Public License, version 3.
Proton is Copyright © 2014–2018 efabless corporation. efabless ceased operations in 2025,
and we have not been able to determine who holds the copyright in the original work today.
We make no claim that Proton is in the public domain, and we do not treat it as unowned.
The AGPL-3.0 grant that efabless published with Proton is irrevocable and runs with the code
regardless of who currently owns it, so Electron is distributed under AGPL-3.0 on the strength of
that grant. The original LICENSE.txt and all upstream copyright and license headers are
preserved unchanged.
If you hold or have acquired rights in the Proton codebase and believe anything here is inaccurate, please open an issue — we will correct the record promptly.
Electron is an effort to bring Proton back into active use. Changes to date:
- fixes for a number of long-standing bugs
- containerized installation
- LEF/DEF parser support for advanced technology nodes
Some of the people working on Electron contributed to Proton originally. That history informs the work but confers no rights beyond the AGPL-3.0 grant above.
Modifications and additions in this fork are Copyright © 2025–2026 Tenstorrent AI ULC and are licensed under AGPL-3.0, the same terms as the upstream work. Individual and third-party contributions are copyright their respective authors.
Electron is an independent open-source project. Tenstorrent holds copyright in contributions made by its employees and licenses them under AGPL-3.0, but:
- Electron is not a Tenstorrent product. It is not part of, bundled with, or a dependency of any Tenstorrent product, SDK, or software distribution.
- Electron is not supported by Tenstorrent. There is no warranty, no service commitment, and no roadmap obligation. See the warranty disclaimer in AGPL-3.0 §§ 15–16.
- No Tenstorrent proprietary code, confidential information, or internal tooling is included in this repository.
- Nothing here grants any license to Tenstorrent trademarks, and no patent license is granted beyond what AGPL-3.0 § 11 itself provides for the code contributed.
Contributions are welcome. Contributions are accepted under AGPL-3.0; by opening a pull request you confirm you have the right to submit the code under that license. Bug reports and enhancement requests are welcome in the issue tracker.
"Proton" and "efabless" are used here solely to identify the upstream project and its original publisher. "Tenstorrent" is a trademark of Tenstorrent AI ULC, used here only to identify the copyright holder in this fork's contributions.
Original Readme text :
This is a framework for ASIC Place and Route. It uses other open source tools like Iverilog, Yosys and few inbuilt engines. Proton provides a platform to import and export chip data in standard formats ( LEF / DEF/ Verilog / GDS2 ). Proton is written in perl and uses many of the packages available on CPAN. The GUI is written in Perl-TK.
clone the latest code from this git repository. Install all the required packages and container stuff using Makefile provided in the INSTALL dir You will need to install Iverilog, Yosys separately on your system. Install the perl packages needed by proton from CPAN. set the following environment variables
export ELECTRON_HOME=/<your-install-dir>/electron
cd $ELECTRON_HOME
make
Proton can be invoked using the following commands export PATH=$ELECTRON_HOME:$PATH
: electron ===> launches electron in shell mode
: electron --nolog --win ===> launches electron in GUI mode
: electron --help ===> prints the launch help message
: electron -f run.tcl ===> executes the commands in run.tcl and returns to shell prompt
By default, electron open in non-gui mode. To open GUI from shell mode type "win" or "gui"
Most of the popular backend ASIC file formats are supported. LEF, DEF, RTL ( Verilog 2005) , gate-level verilog, Spef etc are supported.
Proton has the many of the features of commercial Place and Route tools. We are developing many more actively and ask for community help in giving us feedback and also pitchin to help develop new features Currently following features have been tested to work
import/read LEF(5.8) , DEF, gate level verilog ( hierarchical and flat), GDS2 export/write LEF, DEF, gate level verilog, GDS2
RTL Simulation
Gate level simulation
Synthesis
Interactive Floorplan
Hierarchical Floorplan and Partition Pin Assignment
Power Plan
Placement
Signal Routing
Proton can be used in following modes
digital block implementation
Hierarchical partitining
digital block modelling for use in mixed signal designs
Proton has been used on many designs in tapeout mode but requires some understanding of the steps of the flow. It is not a push button tool yet. It offers complete flexibility to manage the design data and in some cases can allow users to delete objects/ instances and nets that can cause design logic to change. It also has limitation on the size of design it can handle , mostly limited by the placement and routing engines used inside the tool. It can be worked around by using proton in a hierarchical flow.
Pure Digital and Mixed Signal designs are handled well in proton. It is not geared to handle Multi Billion transistor SOCs flat. But with some ingenuity, a large design can be pushed through proton system using hierarchical implementation flow.
Electron has few improvements over Proton, ability to handle large digital designs by exploiting hierarchical nature "hier_place". Some speed up improvements in GUI display with fast rendering.
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