Printed Circuit Board Routing: A Survey

Abstract

The circuit layout problem is an important and difficult problem of computer system design and is encountered in laying out subpackages (e.g. PCBs and integrated circuit masks), where the terminals of a set of components placed on a subpackage are to be interconnected by laying printed wires. The specific set of pins (i.e. terminals) to be made electrically common by printed wire constitutes a single net. Realization of multiple nets on the surface of the PCB is classically termed as ‘Interconnection Problem’ by Hightower (1974) which consists of five sub problems—(i) pin assignment, (ii) Steiner-tree identification for a net, (iii) layering of the wires, (iv) ordering and (v) physical identification of wire path on a PCB. An exhaustive survey on all these subproblems is available in the book edited by Breuer (1972) and survey papers of Hightower (1974), Bose (1977). In this paper, we concentrate on an up-to-date survey of the last sub problem (i.e. wire routing of PCBs). We group together the wire-routing schemes which are analogous in principles. Next, we review one of the popular representative method of each group. A new approach of wire routing proposed by Pal Chaudhuri (1979), (1980) is also briefly introduced.

Indexing Terms:

• Steiner Metric
• Floating Segment

Additional information

Notes on contributors

P. Pal Chaudhuri

Pal Chaudhuri, P (Dr): Born in Calcutta in October, 1941 Dr. Chaudhuri got his BE Degree in Electrical Engineering from Bengal Engineering College. Sibpur, Howrah. From 1963 to 1975, he was attached to I.B.M. World Trade Corporation. In Sept. 1975, he joined IIT, Kharagpur as an Assistant Professor. He got his PhD Degree in Engineering in 1979. His current research interest are Design Automation, Fault diagnosis of Computer Systems and Application of Computer for Medical diagnosis.