I'm not sure if the author is the best reference though - a professional designer with good tooling wouldn't take anywhere near that long. Professional tools l

I'm not sure if the author is the best reference though - a professional designer with good tooling wouldn't take anywhere near that long. Professional tools like Altium, Allegro, etc. have really good interactive routing tools, and some pretty cool semi-automatic routing tools where you select groups of nets, plot an approximate routes, and it works out the finer details. This can make routing busses and stuff almost as fast as routing single tracks. Secondly, sometimes dropping layers isn't an option - given EMI/EMC requirements you're going to need a ground plane in almost all high speed designs (anything over a couple of hundred hundred MHz). So for a lot of designs, four layers is the minimum. Add in impedance control, or RF, and you might need to go to eight (RF microstrip always needs to be next to a ground plane, or stripline needs one above and one below. So you can end up needing a lot of layers especially once you add in power planes). At the end of the day, it's a trade-off between lots of different factors, and I don't think (for any skilled professional) that the quality of the route would really come into it much...