Patent ID: 7590951

Claim:
A method of managing an incremental implementation flow (incremental flow) for a circuit design comprising: storing, on a computer, dependency management data for the incremental flow for the circuit design, wherein the dependency management data specifies which partitions of the circuit design have changed from a prior implementation of the partitions; from within a first application that performs a selected phase of the incremental flow, invoking at least one plug-in software component configured to access the dependency management data for the circuit design, wherein the at least one plug-in software component provides a common interface to the dependency management data for each application that invokes the at least one plug-in software component to perform the selected phase of the incremental flow; the at least one plug-in software component identifying partitions of the circuit design that must be run during the selected phase of the incremental flow according to the dependency management data; and the at least one plug-in software component indicating, to the first application, which partitions to run during the selected phase of the incremental flow.