Switchbox routing by pattern matching

Many good algorithms have been designed that provide good solutions to the wire routing problem in VLSI. Unfortunately, many of these algorithms only consider a small subset of different parameters such as number of layers, routability of layers and technology. We believe that these algorithms can be applied generally to any set of parameters by implementing the algorithms as a description that allows them to take advantage of this flexibility. We propose that routing algorithms either use patterns directly or can be converted to use patterns. We present a powerful formalism for describing these patterns.