One of the most time consuming phases of board design is routing the nets. While the rules system handles the design constraints， such as the widths， via sizes， clearances， and so on， it is down to the designer to place the many thousands of track segments required to fully route a board. Autorouters can ease this pain， but are generally regarded as inadequate， because： They fail to correctly consider the myriad of subtle design constraints that a human designer instinctively applies as they route. They take so long to fully configure that it is often more efficient to simply get on with routing the board interactively. The cleanup can be such a long and difficult process that it is often more efficient to route the board interactively. The holy grail of PCB routing is to quickly produce high quality results， that meet the design rules， under the control of the designer. This is the challenge that ActiveRoute sets out to achieve.

　　What is ActiveRoute？ ActiveRoute is an automated interactive routing technology that delivers efficient multi-net routing algorithms， applied to the specific nets or connections selected by the designer. ActiveRoute also allows the designer to interactively define a route path or Guide， which then defines the river along which the new routes will flow. The key ActiveRoute features that make this approach significantly better than a combination of regular interactive routing and auto routing， include：