Place and route

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Place and Route is a stage in the design of:

• Printed circuit boards, during which components are graphically placed on the board and the wires drawn between them.
• Integrated circuits, during which a layout of a larger block of the circuit or the whole circuit is created from layouts of smaller sub-blocks.

The process for a board or a circuit is similar at a high level, but the actual details are very different. With the large sizes of modern designs, this operation is usually performed by electronic design automation (EDA) tools.

Types of blocks and the process itself depend on design methodology. Due to the complexity of the task, it is usually performed in two separate stages, placement, i.e., determining the positions of the sub-blocks in the design area, and routing, i.e., interconnecting the sub-blocks. Recently (as of 2004) there are attempts to combine the two tasks back into one. Systems that do place and route are sometimes called Silicon Compilers.