The discussion was about where the term tape-out came from, it has nothing to do with autorouters.
We weren't discussing tape-out...
Would some one like to enlighten me to what they mean by the design was hand drawn? Is that even possible now days?
BFL mentioned that a lot of their stuff had to be hand-routed because it was very dense, so we were discussing what that actually meant.
When pressed for a reason why, I have been told that because this is a very dense, hand routed design they are afraid of making a mistake and have required extra checking and sign offs which has slowed down the whole process considerably. They don't want to be on the hook financially for having to redo the whole order.
Am I misreading this, or does this sound like they won't be at tape-out until 30 days from now? (What careful checking of hand routed design will you be doing once the masks are being printed?).