Optimal simultaneous pin assignment and escape routing for dense PCBs

Abstract

In PCB designs, pin positions greatly affect routability of the design. State-of-the-art pin assignment algorithms are guided by simple (heuristic) metrics to estimate routability and thus have no guarantee to obtain a routable solution. In this paper, we present a novel approach to obtain a pin assignment solution that guarantees routability. We show that the problem of simultaneous pin assignment and escape routing can be solved optimally in polynomial time. We then focus on the pin assignment and escape routing for the terminals in a bus, and present algorithmic enhancements as well as discuss the tradeoffs between single-layer and multi-layer implementations. We tested our approach on a state-of-the-art industrial board with 80 buses (over 7000 nets). The pin assignment and escape routing solutions for all the 80 buses are successfully obtainted in less than 5 minutes of CPU time.