GPU-accelerated OrthoRoute – A new KiCad plugin called OrthoRoute uses GPU acceleration to route extremely high-density PCB designs with thousands of nets. Built around an FPGA-inspired routing approach and laid out on a Manhattan-style orthogonal grid, it’s positioned as a speed-first so
He didn’t just have a “big board.” Brian’s PCB was the kind that can freeze traditional autorouters—thousands of nets, the sort of high-density design that, on a good day, could still take months to route by hand.
To tackle that specific bottleneck, he created OrthoRoute, a GPU-accelerated autorouter built to get the work done faster. He’s blunt about expectations: OrthoRoute isn’t “more trustworthy” than any other autorouter. It’s simply fast enough to make the process feel less like an endurance test.
OrthoRoute comes as a KiCad plugin. The name points to how it lays traces: it draws a Manhattan lattice, a grid of orthogonal segments. The design assumes surface-mount parts only, with all components placed on the top layer. Everything beneath uses a structured grid of traces, with connections made where needed using blind and buried vias.
In practice, OrthoRoute uses a structured and iterative approach, pushing toward a layout that converges on a “satisfactory” result. The key decision—how it figures out which connections to make—borrows from a routing algorithm originally designed for FPGAs. Brian adapted PathFinder to the problem of orthogonal grid routing. where punching down through trace grids with vias is conceptually similar to routing between FPGA elements.
That’s where the GPU enters the story. Instead of pipelining the calculations through a CPU, GPU acceleration makes the routing calculations far more efficient, shrinking the time it takes to explore and converge on a usable arrangement.
The bigger takeaway isn’t just that OrthoRoute can handle a difficult board—it’s that GPU-accelerated routing is feasible at all. Brian built the plugin to solve his own kind of pain, but the project also signals what others might do with GPU-assisted routing.
As it stands, he says OrthoRoute is useful to maybe a handful of people at best. Even so, he describes it as highly modular as a KiCad plugin, with the “hard parts” already handled. If you want to study how it’s put together—or repurpose or extend it—he points people to the GitHub repository.
The videos linked with the project show an extremely high-density board routed by OrthoRoute. They also underline a broader reality for KiCad users: the community has plenty of plugins for everything from breadboarding to styling traces. even one aimed at designing custom keyboards. What’s rarer is a tool directly aimed at routing high-density boards with thousands of nets.
Two embedded videos are available for a closer look at the routing in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXxxNQPTagA and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8Wsej71XAQ.
OrthoRoute KiCad plugin GPU-accelerated autorouter PCB routing autorouter PathFinder FPGA routing algorithm Manhattan lattice orthogonal traces blind vias buried vias high-density PCB