Scaleable approach to extracting bridges from a hierarchically described VLSI layout

A bridge fault extractor. For one aspect, one of a plurality of segments of a hierarchically described integrated circuit layout is flattened to produce an annotated list of rectangles. A fault list corresponding to the segment is then computed using the annotated list of rectangles. The fault list is then merged with any prior-generated fault list, and the actions of flattening, computing and merging are repeated for each of the plurality of segments to produce a fault list for the integrated circuit.