The Alliance CAD system handles many file formats. They are summarized here. A file can be either read, using a parser, or written, using a driver.
Being able to understand and write many file formats is a must. First, in a development environment, as it allows to check the validity of tools on other CAD systems. Second, because some tools are not available or desirable within Alliance, but may be useful however: it is possible to feed an other software with a design in that situation.
The experience showa that many of these formats are used daily. For example, the design that we fabricate through the CMP services are transmitted using the GDSII format. The final DRC on these files are performed using Cadence pdverify.
An other example: Alliance does not have a fault simulator yet. However this kind of tool is very useful to evaluate the fault coverage of a set of vectors and must be introduced in a VLSI class. This is hopefully easilly done using the Hilo output of Alliance that feed the hifault simulator.