The present disclosure relates to a chip design layout process. More specifically, the present disclosure is directed to an incremental routing-based pin assignment technique. One example method generally includes: performing routing and pin assignment for a chip design layout, one or more objects of the chip design layout being associated with a routing engine and a pin assignment engine stored in memory; detecting a change associated with the one or more objects of the chip design layout; updating, via one or more processors, at least one of the routing engine or the pin assignment engine stored in the memory in response to the detected change and based on the association between the one or more objects and the routing engine or pin assignment engine; and performing another routing and pin assignment based on the updated at least one of the routing engine or the pin assignment engine.