Patent ID: 8166435

Claim:
A method of optimizing a physical design of an integrated circuit (IC), the IC comprising a plurality of reconfigurable circuits for configurably performing a plurality of operations, the method comprising: identifying, using a computer, a first physical design solution for assigning a plurality of configurable operations to the plurality of reconfigurable circuits of the IC; modifying the first physical design solution to produce a second physical design solution by selecting a reconfigurable circuit that performs a particular configurable operation in a particular reconfiguration cycle in the first physical design solution and assigning said reconfigurable circuit to perform the particular configurable operation in at least two consecutive reconfiguration cycles in the second physical design solution; computing a cost for assigning said reconfigurable circuit to perform the particular configurable operation in at least two consecutive reconfiguration cycles in the second physical design solution; and based on the computed cost, selecting between the first and second physical design solutions.