In this dissertation we present a survey about the Steiner problem in the rectilinear metric, illustrating its applications to the VLSI desing. A large number of heurístics already described in literature is studied in details. Moreover, we study the complexity of these heuristics and the quality of their solutions. New results concerning their worst case behavior are stated. We also propose two new heuristics for thew Steiner problem in the rectilinear metric, for which we study the complexity and the quality of the solutions, including the worst case analysis. A large nember of computational experiments was conducted and allowed the comparison of the performances of the heuristics implemented. We conclude from these experiments that, in the average, the solutions obtained by one of the new heuristics are better than the solutions obtained by those alreafy available in the literature.