[atq2119]

What you've described is actually for placement, not routing, and is in fact a good analogy for the first step in many placement algorithms.

Interestingly, placement is much harder than routing from a complexity theory point of view (specifically, there are fairly strong inapproximability results for placement-style problems).

[Taniwha]

true - most chip tools I've used for layout do both place and route (and iterate, moving std cells apart to create routing resources) so I've always sort of thought of place&route as a single thing (though I've also interrupted it before initial routing to do scan insertion)