Automated Routing for VLSI: Kuh's Group Contributions

EDA (Electronic Design Automation) industry is now a multibillion dollar business and numerous commercial and university tools exist to automatically solve various sub-problems of the IC (integrated circuit) design process. Many of the underlying ideas of the algorithms implemented in those programs originated in Professor Ernest Kuh's research group at UC Berkeley. The objective of this paper is to trace Kuh's group contributions to EDA , to bring attention to this group's many accomplishments in physical design area and to show the effects that the ideas which originated in Kuh's group have had on researchers throughout the years. We limit our attention to routing problems only.