Cleanup of PCell orphans after re-evaluation on load

[klayoutmatthias]

Here is the motivation:

Hi @Matthias

Regarding cleanup(), I find that these orphan PCell variants show up in my layout when I load the GDS file. Namely I save a file with a single top cell, and after opening, there are new orphan top cells.

The specific case is a PCell that creates fixed subcells, where the names are fixed but there are many different instances of the PCell with different parameters. The fixed names get a $1, $2, appended in the subcell, which is fine, except when they are re-evaluated at loading, then I end up with tons of orphans.

I need to run the cleanup function manually after opening the layout. I wrote a script to trigger this to happen automatically after a GDS file is loaded, however, then the layout is marked as edited [+].

I tried adding cleanup() inside the PCells, but that didn't help.

Is there a proper way of having PCells contain subcells and hierarchy?

thank you
Lukas

[klayoutmatthias]

I could reproduce the problem only in a certain situation: if a layout is loaded while the libraries are not available, the cells are marked as "" cells. Once the libraries are made available by executing the library registration code, these cells get connected to the libraries. In this case, no cleanup happened. Maybe that explains the observation.