NetTrace: Net Geometry Tracer
The NetTrace library is intended to provide support for displaying a GDSII/OASIS layout and also tracing out connected nets based on the physical touching of conductors or intersection of conductors with vias on appropriate layers. It is supplied as a pair of shared libraries that interact very closely - thus providing a high performance solution.
This is a library for OEMs - typically companies whose equipment will display a camera image overlaid with the CAD data. The nettrace library enables a client to select a point (or points) on a layer and determine all the electrically connected conductors through all layers.
There are optional functions to detect digital drivers, to detect potential open/short circuits and an option designed to use a list of "hotspots" and to then report all nets that pass through one or more hotspots.
Since GDSII/OASIS files can be quite large, NetTrace has a number of net extraction approaches that enable quick tracing -- fast enough to be the basis for real-time inspection tools.