By concentrating on application-specific behavior, extremely simple and fast state machines can be designed and replicatedinto arrays that fit in one or two chips. Called an iterative state machine array, this architecture can increase speed bya factor of 1000 over the speed possible with traditional software design automation tools. Because the basic ISMA cells areso simple, designers can use special-purpose hardware economically, instead of relying on software for larger, slower general-purposesystems. When applied to two-layer Lee routing, we estimate that the ISMA can route 1000 two-point nets of length 2500? overa (2048?)2 surface in under half a minute. A generalpurpose purpose von Neumann system could take hours, in comparison.