Are hardware accelerators viable? The Manchester routing engine-a case study

The increasing complexity of CAD tasks, coupled with the historical inadequacy of conventional computer resources, has led to the production of hardware accelerators for specific aspects of the design process. Recently, some opinion has questioned the viability of this approach because of the unrelenting increase in performance of general purpose computers, both conventional and parallel multiprocessor. In the context of this debate, this paper considers a specific hardware accelerator for layout built at Manchester University