Does OpenROAD have an ECO flow, or is this an OpenLane feature?

[Blueonics]

I'm trying to understand whether OpenROAD has a built-in ECO (Engineering Change Order) flow, or if this is primarily an OpenLane feature that uses OpenROAD commands underneath.

What I've found:

OpenLane has a documented ECO flow (link) that iteratively fixes hold violations by parsing timing reports, inserting buffers, resizing cells, and rerunning placement/routing until violations are gone.

OpenROAD has individual commands like repair_timing -hold, repair_timing -setup, and repair_design that can perform ECO-like operations.

I found a discussion about resizer refactoring
mentioning beginEco/endEco architecture for move journaling.

My questions:

Does OpenROAD itself have a documented ECO flow, or is OpenLane the primary tool for running ECO flows on top of OpenROAD?

Are the repair_timing commands considered OpenROAD's ECO capability, or is there a higher-level ECO flow I'm missing?

I'd appreciate any clarification about what exactly constitutes OpenROAD's native ECO capabilities versus flow-level features in OpenLane.

[maliberty]

OL is one flow that uses OR. OpenROAD-flow-scripts and siliconcompiler are others. OR provides the toolbox and the flow decides how to apply them.

Are you looking for something specific? ECO capability can have various meanings.

[Blueonics]

Thanks, that makes sense. I understand that OL and ORFS are flows built around OpenROAD.

What I mean more concretely is post-route timing ECO: after routing, run OpenSTA on extracted parasitics, fix setup/hold violations with localized ECOs, legalize only changed instances, incrementally reroute affected nets, re-extract parasitics, and iterate while preserving most of the routed database.

Given that OpenROAD is the toolbox, is it realistic/supported to build my own post-route timing ECO flow directly on top of it, or is using OL/ORFS generally the better and more practical approach?

Either way, I haven’t found much documentation around late-stage/post-route ECO methodology, so any pointers would be really helpful.

[maliberty]

You might read the section starting at https://github.com/The-OpenROAD-Project/OpenROAD-flow-scripts/blob/df27ce67c722868238061fc9b9ce39b2a61356e3/flow/scripts/global_route.tcl#L51

[Blueonics]

Thank you