1. A method for waveform compression, comprising: preprocessing, using a processor and memory storage, a collection of waveforms representing cell and/or interconnect response waveforms; constructing a representative waveform basis using linear algebra to create basis waveforms for a set of waveforms; and representing the collection of waveforms as linear combination coefficients of an adaptive subset of the basis waveforms to compress an amount of stored information needed to reproduce the collection of waveforms.