Two-stage PCB Routing Using Polygon-based Dynamic Partitioning and MCTS

Youbiao He, Hebi Li, Ge Luo, Forrest Sheng Bao

Abstract: We propose a pad-focused, net-by-net, two-stage printed circuit board (PCB) routing approach comprising the global routing using Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS) and the detailed routing using <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$\mathrm{A}^{*}$</tex> :. Compared with conventional PCB routing algorithms, our approach can route PCB components in both BGA and non-BGA packages. To minimize the gap between the global and detailed routing stages, a polygon-based dynamic routable region partitioning mechanism is introduced. Experimental results show that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art routers such as DeepPCB and FreeRouting in terms of success rate or wirelength.