All departments of an outpatient hospital ward of Nagoya University hospital were simulated to examine patient flows and congestion. The method of gathering the required data on times for all outpatients and their routes is described in the performing simulation, especially by making use of the electronic medical records. An outpatient visits one or more clinical departments and/or one or more test/inspection rooms, the reception area, and the payment department. In this procedure, a series of data of terminal units and of test/inspection terminals was used to obtain the required input data for performing simulation as well as the electronic medical records. It was found that the proposed procedure was quite effective to perform a simulation of a large-scale hospital to examine patient flows by applying an actual case.

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This paper presents a diagonal routing method which is applied to an actual microprocessor prototype chip. While including the layout functions for the conventional Manhattan routing with horizontal and vertical directions, a new diagonal routing capability is added as one of the routing functions. With this enhancement, diagonal routing becomes an additional strategy for improving delays of critical paths in the microprocessor design. This method was applied to the prototype chip of the Fujitsu SPARC64 microprocessor with two CPU cores using 90nm process technology. By applying the diagonal routing to long distance nets, net length is reduced by 36% per net on average. When the diagonal routing is applied to a critical path, path delay is improved by as much as about 14 pico-seconds per net on a path. This improvement is more than the delay of a gate with no load. This prototype chip proved that our method was effective in reducing the total net length and improving path delays.

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