A Hardware Maze Router with Application to Interactive Rip-Up and Reroute

This paper presents a new parallel-processing architecture for hardware routers based on the Lee algorithm. Unlike the existing machines, which require N² processors to implement the Lee algorithm on an N x N grid plane, the proposed architecture requires only O(N) processors to find a path in O(N) time. A prototype machine with 64 processors has been developed to deal with a 128 x 128 grid plane. The architecture of the machine is discussed, together with its experimental performance data. Further, it is reported that the parallel-processed Lee algorithm is most useful and powerful when applied to interactive rip-up and reroute.