Place and Route is a stage in design of:

• Printed circuit boards at which components are graphically placed on the board and the wires drawn between them.
• Integrated circuits at which a layout of a larger block of the circuit or the whole circuit is created from layouts of smaller sub-blocks.

The process for a board or a circuit is similar at a high level, but the actual details are very different. With the large sizes of modern designs, this operation is usually performed by electronic design automation (EDA) tools. Close-up photo of one side of a motherboard PCB, showing conductive traces, vias and solder points for through-hole components on the opposite side. ... In general, a things components are its parts; the things that compose it. ... An integrated circuit (IC) is a thin chip consisting of at least two interconnected semiconductor devices, mainly transistors, as well as passive components like resistors. ... Integrated circuit layout, also known IC layout or IC mask layout is the representation of an integrated circuit in terms of planar geometric shapes that correspond to shapes actually drawn on photomasks used in semiconductor device fabrication. ... Electronic design automation (EDA) is the category of tools for designing and producing electronic systems ranging from printed circuit boards (PCBs) to integrated circuits. ...

Types of blocks and the process itself depend on design methodology. Due to the complexity of the task, it is usually performed in two separate stages, placement, i.e., determining the positions of the sub-blocks in the design area, and routing, i.e., interconnecting the sub-blocks. Recently (as of 2004) there are attempts to combine the two tasks back into one. 2004 is a leap year starting on Thursday of the Gregorian calendar. ...