Combinatorial Problems in Chip Design

The design of very large scale integrated (VLSI) chips is an exciting area of applying mathematics, posing constantly new challenges. We present some important and challenging open problems in various areas of chip design. Although the problems are motivated by chip design, they are formulated mathematically; understanding and solving them does not require any knowledge of chip design. We give some partial results and argue why a full resolution of one of the problems could result in an advance of the state of the art in algorithms for chip design.