13 Lessons Learned Building an Open-Source Autorouter
2025-03-28
The author shares 13 lessons learned from building an autorouter for tscircuit, an open-source electronics CAD kernel. The post highlights the power of the A* algorithm and its adaptability in optimizing autorouting, including using multi-level A* for hyperparameter optimization and replacing inefficient quadtrees with spatial hash indexes. The author stresses the importance of algorithms over programming language, advocating for cacheable algorithms and visualization tools for debugging and optimization. Finally, the post discusses the pros and cons of recursive functions, Monte Carlo algorithms, and weighted A* algorithms.