Patent ID: 7076537

Claim:
A method of designing an interconnect fabric for communication between a set of source nodes and a set of terminal nodes, comprising: obtaining a design for an interconnect fabric having an interconnect device layer adjacent to either the set of source nodes or the set of terminal nodes, the interconnect device layer comprising a first interconnect device; identifying flow sets that traverse the interconnect device layer, each flow set specifying communication bandwidth between a source node of the set of source nodes and a terminal node of the set of terminal nodes and the flow sets including at least a first flow set that passes through the first interconnect device; merging a pair of the flow sets, the pair including at least the first flow set and said merging comprising adding a second interconnect device to the design, the second interconnect device being linked to the first interconnect device, thereby alleviating at least one port violation and adding an additional interconnect device layer that includes the second interconnect device to the design; and implementing the design.