Patent 7222114 was granted and assigned to Xilinx on May, 2007 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
A method of a rule-based operation can include the steps of dividing a design rule into at least one of three components including an application criteria, a rule condition, and an action. The method can further include the steps of expressing the design rule as a datafile or source code and binding the three components together to form a rule object at runtime.