@User: On a (mostly) unrelated matter: I was working with the caravan user project wrapper and realized that my xschem schematic of the user example analog project didn't have the clamp connections and output enabled tied off to ground like I have them in the layout. I realized that this was a big issue in Magic because if I short two ports together, one of them gets optimized out. So I added in metal resistors to split the nets. Then I wondered what is the behavior in xschem if I just shorted two pins together with a wire. It appears that the behavior is to keep treating the two ports as being on separate nets even though they are connected together. I recognize that just connecting the ports like that is, at best, ambiguous, but I would expect xschem to throw an error message when it creates the netlist.

@Tim Edwards Shorting two ports with a net throws a warning. I agree with you, if you don't open the ERC window you won't see it. Will work on a solution for that, for example popping out the window in case of critical errors like this and turning from warning to error. If you have better suggestions how to handle this kind of situations let me know. In some cases you can optimize out one of the ports, but doing this automatically will throw out always the wrong port by murphy rule. In my esperience intentional shorts should be done with a dedicated LVS device (metal res or similar).

All of that sounds right to me. Popping up the error window in case of an error seems like reasonable behavior.

@Tim Edwards Is that Schematic available to be used?

@Amro Tork: I don't have a schematic of the chip top, only the user project wrapper top. I need to correct a few issues in both the schematic and layout, especially as they relate to the above discussion about shorting nets between pins with different names. The schematic is missing the connections between a handful of pins and ground, but the layout needs to have metal resistors added to split the nets, or else LVS won't pass.