Systems, methods, and software products iteratively traverse a hierarchical circuit design. An initial net and an instance history that uniquely defines the initial net within the design are selected. The initial net and the instance history are appended to a list of nets to be processed. The initial net and the instance history are inserted into a set of visited nets. Each additional net connected to the initial net is visited in response to a first request from a user. The initial net and each additional net are returned in response to a second request from the user.