A provably good moat routing algorithm

Moat routing is the routing of nets between the input/output pads and the core circuit. In this paper, it is proved that moat routing is NP-complete under the routing model in which there are no vertical conflicts and doglegs are disallowed (i.e., every net is routed within a single track). This contrasts with the fact that channel routing is efficiently solvable under these restrictions. The paper then presents an approximation algorithm for moat routing that computes moat routing solutions that are guaranteed to use at most four times the optimal number of tracks. Empirical results are presented indicating that for a number of industrial benchmarks, the algorithm produces solutions that are near optimal and that use significantly fewer tracks than previous moat routing strategies