System and method for determining density maps in hierarchical designs

A method for calculating density maps in hierarchical designs includes the steps of deoverlapping objects in the design, providing an area of interest in the design, generating a grid in the area of interest to partition the area of interest into grid elements, determining whether the local properties of each object within the grid elements have been previously calculated, if previously calculated, adding the previously calculated value for the local properties to a corresponding grid element, otherwise, calculating the local properties of the object and summing the local properties of the objects for each associated grid element such that the local properties are calculated only once for a given object throughout the design. A system is also includes for implementing the method.