Patent ID: 6981235

Claim:
A method of analyzing a design of an electronic circuit comprising: (a) defining a query area within a zone tree having a plurality of slices; (b) determining a distance from each of the plurality of slices within the zone tree to the query area; (c) ordering the plurality of slices in a non-decreasing distance order; (d) selecting a first slice in the order of the plurality of slices as a selected slice; (e) determining a distance from each object in selected the slice to the query area; (f) selecting the object with the smallest distance as a current nearest neighbor, and the smallest distance as a current nearest neighbor distance; (g) determining whether the distance for the next slice in the order is greater than the current nearest neighbor distance; (h) if the distance for the next slice is not greater than the current nearest neighbor distance, then selecting the next slice in the order as the selected slice and repeating (e), (f), and (g); and (i) otherwise, returning the current nearest neighbor as the nearest neighbor to the query area.