The minimum rectilinear Steiner tree (MRST) problem arises in global routing and wiring estimation, as well as in many other areas. The MRST problem is known to be NPhard, and the best performing MRST heuristic to date is the Iterated 1-Steiner (IIS) method recently proposed by Kahng and Robins. In this paper, we develop a straightforward, efficient implementation of IIS, achieving a speedup factor of three orders of magnitude over previous implementations. We also give a parallel implementation that achieves near-linear speedup on multiple processors. Several performance-improving enhancements enable us to obtain Steiner trees with average cost within 0.257 of optimal, and our methods produce optimal solutions in up to 90t/' of the cases for typical nets. We generalize 11S and its variants to three dimensions, as well as to the case where all the pins lie on k parallel planes, which arises in, e.g., multilayer routing. Motivated by the goal of reducing the running times of our algorithms, we prove that any pointset in the Manhattan plane has a minimum spanning tree (MST) with maximum degree 4, and that in three-dimensional Manhattan space every pointset has an MST with maximum degree of 14 (the best previous upper bounds on the maximum MST degree in two and three dimensions are 6 and 26, respectively); these results are of independent theoretical interest and also settle an open problem in complexity theory.
Motivated by practical VLSI routing applications, we study the maximum vertex degree of a minimum spanning tree (MST). We prove that, under the L j, norm, the maximum vertex degree over all MSTs is equal to the Hadwiger number of the corresponding unit ball; we show an even tighter bound for MSTs where the maximum degree is minimized. We give the best-known bounds for the maximum MST degree for arbitrary L e metrics in all dimensions, with a focus on the rectilinear metric in two and three dimensions. We show that for any finite set of points in the rectilinear plane an MST exists with maximum degree of at most 4, and for three-dimensional rectilinear space the maximum possible degree of a minimum-degree MST is either 13 or 14.
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