Significant improvement is achieved in the analysis of IC layout by utilizing the fact that IC designs exhibit a large amount of regularity. By employing a unique mesh generation approach that takes advantage of the regularity, combined with the use of a limited number of different shapes for the majority of the IC geometry greatly increases the speed of processing. Additionally, by employing a unique approach for specifying the different mesh elements--based on the parameters that define the relative difference between one shape and another--provides significant additional reductions in the necessary calculations, and a corresponding increase in speed of IC simulations. Yet another improvement is realized by simplifying the inductive influence calculations by employing averages that permit using dot products of vectors rather than integrations of non-constant vectors.