Patent 7478355 was granted and assigned to United Microelectronics Corporation on January, 2009 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
A chip with programmable input/output (I/O) circuits has a plurality of layout layers including a plurality of same layouts in a plurality of positions of the layout layers so as to implement a plurality of sub-circuit cells with the same layout, and at least a connection layer having different layouts corresponding to the different positions of the layout layers so that the sub-circuit cells in different positions implement different circuit functions.