An escape routing framework for dense boards with high-speed design constraints

Shrinking transistor sizes, increasing circuit complexities, and high clock frequencies bring new board routing challenges that cannot be handled effectively by traditional routing algorithms. Many high-end designs in the industry today require manual routing efforts, which increases the design cycle times considerably. In this paper, we propose an escape routing algorithm to route nets within multiple dense components simultaneously so that the number of crossings in the intermediate area is minimized. We also show how to handle high-speed design constraints within the framework of this algorithm. Experimental comparisons with a recently proposed algorithm (Ozdal and Wong, 2004) show that our algorithm reduces the via requirements of industrial test cases on average by 39%.