The advisory board will consist of approximately 12 members, elected for three-year terms, Synopsys (Mountain View, Calif.) and Si2 (Austin, Texas) said. Membership will include representatives from EDA vendors, end users, foundries and intellectual property (IP) providers, the organizations said. Requests for enhancements can come from the membership as well as the overall Liberty user base.

Board members have not yet been chosen. Solicitations have been sent out, according to Robert Hoogenstryd, director of product marketing for Synopsys' implementation group, and a board member announcement is expected in "weeks rather than months."

Liberty includes a current-source model, considered a replacement for the nonlinear delay models used with the ".lib" library format. Those table-lookup models capture single data points for timing and represent drivers as voltage sources. A current-source model, by contrast, contains a current waveform that more closely matches the Spice behavior of a cell. At 90 nanometers and below, technologists say, current-source models are needed to bring more accuracy to delay calculation.

Synopsys claims that Liberty is the de-facto standard in library modeling, with support from more than 60 EDA vendors with more than 750 libraries in production. Liberty is said to enable accurate and comprehensive modeling of nanometer effects, including timing, noise, power and test.

Synopsys released its composite current-source (CCS) model, an extension to the open source Liberty, in 2004. But it's not the only game in town. Synopsys' largest EDA rival, Cadence Design Systems Inc., has had its own Effective Current Source Model (ECSM) since 2001. Another top-tier EDA player, Magma Design Automation Inc., endorsed ECSM in 2004.

Both Synopsys and Cadence claim that their respective models are superior, something that has raised the not-so-enticing prospect of designers and IC library vendors being forced to juggle two incompatible formats. Si2 said last year that it would like to move forward with both models and bring them into convergence.

One knock on CCS is that, while it has been available to anyone on an open source basis, approval and implementation of changes has been completely controlled by Synopsys. The formation of the technical advisory board might mean that other companies will soon have input.

Despite the battle over current-source models, Liberty's supremecy as a modeling library format is unchallenged, Hoogenstryd said. Even ECSM is only a set of extensions built on top of the Liberty format, he said.

"This is a pretty exciting announcement for us and Si2," Hoogenstryd said of the advisory board. "We are taking openness to the next level with regard to Liberty and creating an extremely efficient way to evolve this standard."

For Si2, which is involved in facilitating a number of standardization and collaborative development efforts, the formation of a technical advisory board is an unusual, but not unprecedented step, according to Steve Schultz, the organization's president and CEO. Shultz pointed to Si2's creation of a governing board in 2001 for the LEF/DEF open source community as an example of a precedent.

"Liberty has been very popular, and, consequently, many challenges are coming across the industry supply chain concurrently," Schultz said. "We really have an urgent need to work together. I can think of no better approach to bring together everyone in the supply chain to be able to communicate in real time the changes and enhancements necessary and avoid creating sequential bottlenecks."

Si2's efforts also include the Open Modeling Coalition (OMC), established last September, which is using ESCM as the starting point for the static representation standard it is developing. OMC released version 2.0 of the ECSM specification in March.

An application for membership on the Liberty technical advisory board is available on Si2's Web site.