Simulated annealing has long been one of the classic metaheuristic methods applied to autorouting in circuit design. It was widely used in early research and some commercial tools because its probabilistic approach helps escape local minima in these NP‐hard problems. Today, while many modern autorouters in industry tend to favor faster or more specialized hybrid methods, simulated annealing remains a common benchmark in academic studies and research prototypes for routing and related tasks like floorplanning.

Source: I once wrote a simulated annealer for VLSI wiring. It was cool.