Efficient breakout routing in printed circuit boards

Breakout routing is a single-layer wire-routing problem in which each of a set of pins must be connected to one of a set of vias, but no matching is prespecified. We propose a network-flow approach to breakout routing in which the wiring grid is modeled by a more compact graph. Our graph is a factor of θ(κ2) smaller than the wiring grid, where κ is the ratio of via spacing to pin spacing, which improves both the space and run time efficiency of the flow computation. A flow in the compact graph can be transformed into a wire layout, and vice versa.