An Application of Branch and Bound Method to Automatic Printed Circuit Board Routing

This paper describes an approach to PCB routing which applies the Branch and Bound Method to the search for a path between two points. A special multiple pass method of pseudo-parallel routing is applied in order to insure that simple interconnections are made at the earliest stages. The algorithm has been implemented by Computervision Corporation on a 32K word, 16 bit minicomputer based system.