Hardware accelerators-meeting the RISC challenge

Today´s workstations offer a significant performance acceleration compared with yesterday´s general purpose computers, raising the question of whether there is a role for specialised hardware accelerators. The paper discusses this issue in the context of an engine developed by the Computer Science Department at Manchester University, for routing multilayer printed circuit boards. The accelerator has formed an essential part of the department´s CAD facility for several years and a second generation machine has just been commissioned