Efficient Breakout Routing in Printed Circuit Boards (Extended Abstract)

) John Hershberger ? and Subhash Suri ?? Abstract. Breakout routing is a single-layer wire-routing problem in which each of a set of pins must be connected to one of a set of vias, but no matching is prespecified. We propose a network-flow approach to breakout routing in which the wiring grid is modeled by a more compact graph. Our graph is a factor of \Theta( 2 ) smaller than the wiring grid, where is the ratio of via spacing to pin spacing, which improves both the space and run time efficiency of the flow computation. A flow in the compact graph can be transformed into a wire layout, and vice versa. 1 Introduction Breakout routing is a crucial problem in routing printed circuit boards (PCBs) and multichip modules (MCMs). The problem arises because a typical PCB or MCM has multiple layers available for routing, but electronic components are often connected to only a single layer of the board. Completing the routing requires that these surface-mounted components be connected to..