Maximizing pin alignment in vlsi routing with movable terminals

This paper addresses a new problem of aligning two rows of movable terminals in order to minimize the channel width and via usage in the channel. The alignment problem of movable terminals is subject to the constraint that the number of vertical tracks used is not increased in the process. This constraint is not considerated in the paper referred to [6] which first considered the alignment problem of movable terminals. This problem is first shown to be NP-complete, therefore, we present a heuristic algorithm. All examples presented in [2] including Deutsch’s difficult example are used as the test routing problems. The programs were coded in C and implemented on SUN 3/110 workstation.