Place and route is a stage in the design of printed circuit boards, integrated circuits, and field-programmable gate arrays. As implied by the name, it is composed of two steps, placement and routing. The first step, placement, involves deciding where to place all electronic components, circuitry, and logic elements in a generally limited amount of space. This is followed by routing, which decides the exact design of all the wires needed to connect the placed components. This step must implement all the desired connections while following the rules and limitations of the manufacturing process.
Place and route is used in several contexts:
- Printed circuit boards, during which components are graphically placed on the board and the wires drawn between them
- Integrated circuits, during which a layout of a larger block of the circuit or the whole circuit is created from layouts of smaller sub-blocks
- FPGAs, during which logic elements are placed and interconnected on the grid of the FPGA
These processes are similar at a high level, but the actual details are very different. With the large sizes of modern designs, this operation is usually performed by electronic design automation (EDA) tools.
In all these contexts, the final result when placing and routing is finished is the layout, a geometric description of the location and rotation of each part, and the exact path of each wire connecting them.
Occasionally some people call the entire place-and-route process layout.
Read more about Place And Route: Printed Circuit Board, Field Programmable Gate Array, Integrated Circuits, History
Famous quotes containing the words place and, place and/or route:
“For most of my adult life, I have been an emotional hit-and- run driver—that is, a reporter. I made people like me, trust me, open their hearts and their minds to me, and cry and bleed on to the pages of my neat little notebooks, and then I went back to a safe place and made a story out of it.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)
“But the place which you have selected for your camp, though never so rough and grim, begins at once to have its attractions, and becomes a very centre of civilization to you: “Home is home, be it never so homely.””
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“By whatever means it is accomplished, the prime business of a play is to arouse the passions of its audience so that by the route of passion may be opened up new relationships between a man and men, and between men and Man. Drama is akin to the other inventions of man in that it ought to help us to know more, and not merely to spend our feelings.”
—Arthur Miller (b. 1915)