Toward a Steiner engine: enhanced serial and parallel implementations of the iterated 1-Steiner MRST algorithm

The minimum rectilinear Steiner tree (MRST) problem is known to be NP-hard, and the best performing MRST heuristic to date is the Iterated 1-Steiner (I1S) method recently proposed by A.B. Kahng and G. Robins (1992). The authors develop a straightforward, efficient implementation of I1S, achieving speedup factors of over 200 compared to previous implementations. They also propose a parallel implementation of I1S that achieves high parallel speedup on K processors. Extensive empirical testing confirms the viability of the approach, which allows the benchmarking of I1S on nets containing several hundred pins