After all the bashing of Auto-Routing etc. please note that major Mother board design houses in Taiwan/ Singapore/ China use Specctra (occasionally others like PCAD or PROTEL for simpler boards) to auto-route boards and after that clean-up manually. It allows you to setup groups of components so when using auto placement they are placed near-by but still the designer needs to do some adjustment before moving on to routing.

If we follow manual routing during design phase of the boards our products will finalize too late even to market as you understand how fast the PC market moves. The new breed of PCB designers are now mostly adapted to this method because if you want to stay competitive you have to follow it whether you like it or not.

Even the chip designing software are being automated as well to cope with the increased demand and fast pace of this industry.

http://news.com.com/2100-1001...egacy=cnet

Regards,
xImran