Abstract
A direct method is devised to prove, without information-theoretic arguments, the Ω(N 2 /log 2 N) wire area lower bound for the shuffle-exchange and cube-connected cycles graphs. We further show the high occurrence of long edges in two ways: (1) In any layout, there are Ω(N/log N) edges whose lengths are at least N/32 log 2 N. (2) The edges whose lengths are at least N/64 log 2 N occupy Ω(N 2 /log 2 N) wire area. © 1986.