A waveform viewer is a software tool for viewing the signal levels of either a digital or analog circuit design.
Simulators can be used to interactively capture wave data for immediate viewing on a waveform viewer; however, for integrated circuit design the usage model is typically to save the output of simulation runs by running batch jobs and to view the waveforms off-line as a static database.
In addition, the waveform view has many ways of displaying signal information, such as in hexadecimal, binary, or a symbolic value.
The proprietary wave formats usually have faster record and playback speeds or require smaller memory store space, or save additional signal information for viewing, such as bus transactions.
[1] These are built into most logic analyzer, data acquisition cards, and automatic test equipment.