A hexagonal array machine for multilayer wire routing

Maze routing is widely used in both printed circuit board (PCB) and VLSI design. However, for the ever increasing design requirements, this can no longer he done economically without the help of special purpose hardware accelerators. A new hardware accelerator comprised of several fast processors interconnected in the form of a hexagonal mesh with wraparound connections is proposed. The novelty of the proposed architecture stems from the fact that it is suitable not only for single-layer routing, but also for routing in parallel on multiple layers. A hexagonal machine of dimension C G , with about 3kC processors, can handle a k-layer grid consisting of kC' grid points a t about the same speed as a full-grid machine with kG' proces-