Techniques and circuitry are used to more rapidly configuring programmable integrated circuits. Configuration data is input into a programmable integrated circuit in parallel via parallel inputs (705), and this data is also handled internally in parallel. The configuration data will be stored in a data register (722). This data register includes two or more serial register chains, each chain being made up of a serial chain of registers. The configuration data is input into the two of more chains of the data registers in parallel. Circuitry is also provided to handle redundancy.