Cong made fundamental contributions to the FPGA synthesis technology. His result in the early 1990s on depth-optimal mapping (FlowMap) for lookup-table based FPGAs is a cornerstone of all FPGA logic synthesis tools used today. This, together with the subsequent works on the cut-enumeration and Boolean matching based methods for FPGA mapping, led to a successful startup company Aplus Design Technologies (1998-2003) founded by Cong. Aplus developed the first commercially available FPGA architecture evaluation tool and physical synthesis tool, which were OEMed by most FPGA companies and distributed to tens of thousands of FPGA designers worldwide. Aplus was acquired by Magma Design Automation in 2003, which is now part of Synopsys.