CANAL: an efficient program for channel routing

The use of an edge algorithm followed by several maze routers has been found to be one of the most powerful tools for channel routing. CANAL offers an automated environment for solving any channel routing (both cyclic and acyclic) using this approach. CANAL is divided into three major parts: an entry editor, and algorithm for channel routing, and an output processor. The entry editor allows the user to define the netlist interactively or to read these data from a file with a specific format. The algorithmic part repetitively uses an edge algorithm followed by two maze algorithms. Using the symbolic solution from the algorithms and tables with cross-reference between the real and the symbolic channels, the output processor generates a file with a mask specification format with the layout of the routed channel