Introducing NeuroRoute, the "Autorouter With a Brain"

Thursday, August 10, 1995

Harvard, MA--NeuroCad, Inc., a Harvard Massachusetts startup company
announces release of its NEUROROUTE autorouter with shipments in August of
this year.

NEUROROUTE is different from all previous board autorouters in that it uses
Artificial Intelligence in the form of a trained Neural Net. H. G. Marsh,
president and founder of NeuroCad said "We believe NEUROROUTE is the first
practical use of Neural Nets in an EDA application. The trained Neural
Net, together with a large repertoire of enhanced routing algorithms has
indeed produced a new generation of PCB autorouters." Marsh continued "our
tests of NEUROROUTE have clearly demonstrated that it is a superior
autorouter in the Quality of Routing, Percentage of Completion and Routing
Time."

The Neural Net contained in NEUROROUTE has been trained utilizing a large
number of boards routed interactively by experienced, professional board
designers and produces the "costs" used by the NEUROROUTE routing
algorithms. This results in a routing pattern similar to that of an
experienced board designer--fewer vias, less track meandering, diagonal
segments and "angled direction per layer." This latter feature (Angled
Direction by Layer) is unique to NEUROROUTE and by routing on an angle or
Hypotenuse designated by the user, 45 degrees up for example, much shorter
tracks and fewer vias are produced--all important to High Speed Logic
routing. The enclosed figure is an example of Angle Direction by Layer on
an 10-layer, multi-layer board where one layer is angled at 45 degrees up
and a second layer is angled at 45 degrees down.

NEUROROUTE is a shape based autorouter using Neural shapes, a concept that
has all the advantages of conventional shape based routing plus a number
of additional advantages such as diagonal segments, angled direction by
layer, etc.

NEUROROUTE is either gridded or gridless (user option). It has a 30-routing
layer capability with no limits on number of connections, number of parts,
number of pads, etc.

An automatic Test Point generator for both bare boards and in circuit
boards is available.

An extremely powerful auto-interactive RoutEdit editor is available. It
provides the ability to automatically route individual connections or nets
as selected by the user in a sequential fashion, autoroute by component,
autoroute by user-designated area and. finally, a proprietary
"sketch-a-track" feature that allows the user to sketch (paint brush
fashion) the desired track location, after which the autorouter matches
this "sketched" location. Finally, an interactive manual route capability
with DRC supervision is also provided.

NEUROROUTE runs on IBM-compatible 486/66 and faster machines with 32
Megabytes recommended.

Operating systems include Windows, Windows NT and Windows 95.

It is interfaced to PADS, Protel, PCAD, Tango and Redac CADSTAR and
Massteck. Interfaces to the European based Ultimate and Spea CAD layout
systems are in process.

NEUROROUTE 100, a batch autorouter with 30 layers and no restrictions on
pads, components and connections lists for $2995.00 (North America.)

NEUROROUTE 200, containing NEUROROUTE 100 and the ROUTEDIT editor and
automatic Test Point generator lists at $5995.00 (North America.)

A Rules Driven, High-Speed Logic version of NEUROROUTE (NR300) containing
Neural cluster parts placement and High-Speed Logic autorouting is in
process and expected at the end of this calendar year.

A free copy of the software with a number of boards in the format of the
user's CAD system is available, This Compare software allows the user to
compare his existing autorouter against NEUROROUTER by routing the same
boards in both autorouters as a basis for comparison.

NeuroCad Inc
PO Box 237
Harvard, MA 01451
508-456-8893,  fax 508-456-8573
 
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