Tree Structures and Algorithms for Physical Design

Tree structures and algorithms provide a fundamental and powerful data abstraction and methods for computer science and operations research. In particular, they enable significant advancement of IC physical design techniques and design optimization. For the last half century, Prof. T. C. Hu has areas in computer science, including network flows, integer programming, shortest paths, binary trees, global routing, etc. In this article, we select and summarize three important and interesting tree-related topics (ancestor trees, column generation, and alphabetical trees) in the highlights of Prof. T. C. Hu's contributions to physical design.