Show HN: GPU-Based Autorouting for KiCad
Show HN (score: 5)Description
This is a KiCad plugin with a few different algorithms, the coolest of which is a 'Manhattan routing grid' autorouter that routes along orthogonal traces. The basic idea was to steal an algorithm from FPGA routing and apply it to PCBs. I'm using CuPy for speeding up the routing; CPU-bound is at least 10x slower than the GPU version.
This is in a very pre-alpha state, but it does _technically_ work. It's not great by any measure but then again it is an autorouter.
I have a writeup with the how and why it was made: https://bbenchoff.github.io/pages/OrthoRoute.html
And a video showing it route a 512-net backplane in just over 2 minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXxxNQPTagA
This is very cool and one of the first good uses of the KiCad IPC API that was released a few months ago. If this sounds interesting and useful, PRs and issues welcome.
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