ROUT: a design automation teaching tool

ROUT is a computer program written in FORTRAN which simulates some of the characteristics of a mazerunning router for a two-layer printed circuit board. The objective of this program is not to actually route from-tos, but rather to aid in studying the effects of various wiring rules. For this reason, from-to points and wire segments are generated and placed using pseudo-random techniques. No actual connections are made. Rather, congestion is developed on the board as if the pseudo-randomly generated from-tos had actually been routed. ROUT has been developed and implemented on the University of Texas, Austin's CDC CYBER computer system for use in a graduate course in Digital Design Automation.