Routing multiterminal nets on a hexagonal grid

Channel routing is a vital task in the layout design of VLSI circuits. Multiterminal channel routing is different from two-terminal one. While the later is quite understood, the former still poses the difficulty. In this paper, we investigate the multiterminal channel routing problem in a hexagonal model, whose grid is composed of horizontal tracks, right tracks (with slope +60°), and left tracks (with slope −60°). We present an efficient algorithm for routing multiterminal nets on a channel of width d + 3, where d is the problem density. Furthermore, we can wire the layout produced by the router using four layers and there are no overlaps among different layers. This improves the previous known results 15, 19].