Interchangeable pin routing with application to package layout

Many practical routing problems such as BGA, PGA, pin redistribution and test xture routing involve routing with interchangeable pins. These routing problems, especiallypackage layout, isbecoming more di cultto do manuallydue to increasing speed and I/O. Currently, no commercial or university router is available for this task. In this paper, we unify these di erent problems as instances of Interchangeable Pin Routing (IPR) problem. We show that this problem is NP-complete. We formulate the problem as ows in a routing network on a triangulation instead of grids and developed a min-cost max- ow heuristic considering only the most important cuts in the design. The heuristic is extended to multiple layers and handles prerouted nets. It can accommodate all-angle, octilinear or rectilinear metric. Experiments showed that the heuristic is very e ective on most practical examples. It successfully routed an industry design with 4000 interchangeable pins without manual intervention.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1996
• Where: ICCAD
• Authors: Man-Fai Yu, Joel Darnauer, Wayne Wei-Ming Dai
• Keywords: Hardware, ICCAD 1996, Interchangeable Pins, Practical Routing Problems, Routing