In a very heated IC global routing contest at the International Symposium on Physical Design (ISPD), the BoxRouter team from UT led by Dr. David Pan won 2nd place in the industry-strength 3D category. BoxRouter was based on a DAC 2006 paper by Minsik Cho and David Pan which helped to generate the recent renaissance of global routing research.

The ISPD’07 Global Routing contest's purpose was to guide researchers toward the most urgent challenges in the EDA industry and also to map out state-of-the-art solutions. It attracted 17 teams from US and Asia, including entries from industry, but only 11 teams survived at the final contest. BoxRouter completed the most number of circuits overall.