The first step, placement, involves deciding where to place all electronic components, circuitry, and logic elements in a generally limited amount of space.
In all these contexts, the final result when placing and routing is finished is the "layout", a geometric description of the location and rotation of each part, and the exact path of each wire connecting them.
[2] The IC place-and-route stage typically starts with one or more schematics, HDL files, or pre-routed IP cores, or some combination of all three.
It produces an IC layout that is automatically converted to a mask work in the standard GDS II or the OASIS format.
At first, it merely sped up the process of making many small edits without spending a lot of time peeling up and sticking down the tape.
Some people hope that further improvements in autoplacers and autorouters will eventually produce good layouts without any human manual intervention.