Re: gEDA-user: Toporouter update?

[Anthony Blake <tonyb33@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, Mar 18, 2010 at 1:37 PM, Windell H. Oskay <windell@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>>> Haha nice..  "I used to route boards by hand, but then I became
>>> awesome instead. True story."
>>
>>    tea -> keyboard
>
> I suggest it because (1) it's awesome and (2) it's suggestive of
> 'autorouter."
>
>
>  Back on topic now, we might get some good hints for future features from
> Toporouter (the commercial autorouter product).  One of the ones that
> they tout is understanding logical equivalence of certain pins.  You
> could further imagine a very advanced version of this that could select
> which slot of (say) a quad op-amp to use.

I've already had a first stab at implementing that, in an effort to
generate a good solution for DDR2-SDRAM <-> FPGA routing. It is very
hard to do well, as the problem just gets even more NP-complete =)
Since my first attempt >year ago, I've learnt a few data
mining/machine learning tricks, and I'm feeling much more confident
about doing it *well* a second time around.

btw, those toporouter guys are rather misleading with their results..
they show off pictures of boards which have been fixed up afterwards..
e.g., "20 mins of toporouter time, and 40 mins of hand editing" for
one of their boards.

And while I'm on the subject of comparing autorouters.. I was looking
at a Mentor license agreement the other day.. and I was shocked to see
that they prohibit you from using it to compare results with other
tools.. wtf..

> Honestly, optimization beyond what's already there would be great for a
> future version, but I'm so craving just what I've seen so far.

Thanks for your support!

-- 
Anthony Blake


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