NEWTOWN, TEWKESBURY, ENGLAND -- Alan C. Finch, the father of the shape-based autorouter, passed away yesterday.

In 1985, Finch, with coauthors K.J. Mackenzie, G.J. Balsdon, and G. Symonds of Racal Redac, proposed a gridless method for designing fine-line printed circuit board. The inventors said in their groundbreaking paper, which was presented at the 22nd IEEE Design Automation Conference, that then-current designs had "stretched most previous automatic routing algorithms to the limit."

Building on a concept from 1980 by Ulrich Lauther, the former Racal­-Redac developer conceived a router with no defined cell size. The resulting tools forever changed the way printed circuit design design is performed.

Racal-Redac merged with Zuken in 1994.