Patent ID: 8312410

Claim:
A computer-implemented method for facilitating the creation of a design in an electronic design automation (EDA) application, comprising: persisting evaluation results associated with a parameterized cell in the design across sessions of the EDA application, which involves storing an evaluation result of a variant of the parameterized cell at a location in a cache file, and mapping the variant to the location in the cache file; using the persisted evaluation results to instantiate, by using one or more computers, the parameterized cell without re-evaluating the parameterized cell, which involves: transparently intercepting an evaluation request for the parameterized cell, wherein transparent interception of the evaluation request is enabled by registering an interposing evaluator whose name is the same as the evaluator; and in response to the evaluation request: instantiating the parameterized cell from the cache file if the cache file contains an evaluation result corresponding to the evaluation request; and if the evaluation result is not found in the cache file, passing the evaluation request to an evaluator for the parameterized cell, and storing evaluation results from the evaluator in the cache file; and discarding the persisted evaluation results based at least on a dependency associated with the parameterized cell.