Tag Archives: silicon

Open source PDKs joining the Linux Foundation’s CHIPS Alliance

In November 2020, we launched our Open Source MPW Shuttle Program to make it easier for researchers and developers to build custom silicon and to enable a thriving ecosystem around open source hardware. Working with our partner, SkyWater Technology, we released the first foundry-supported open source process design kit (PDK) for their 130nm mixed-signal CMOS technology (SKY130), then welcomed GlobalFoundries as a partner with the release of an open source PDK for their 180nm MCU process (GF180MCU).

Then, to give researchers and developers a way to validate and prove their designs made with the PDKs, we partnered with Efabless to fund a series of no-cost manufacturing shuttles for open source designs. In support of this program, Efabless released an end-to-end RTL to GDS design stack called OpenLane that is open source, freely available, and fully supported by their manufacturing platform. OpenLane is now being maintained as part of the OpenROAD Project. When combined with open source PDKs, a design’s verification results can now be freely shared and easily replicated by other researchers and developers, which has enabled a new collaborative model to evaluate and iterate on ideas.

Pictures of a full wafer from the first SKY130 shuttle, a tray of bare dies, and a project bring-up from SKY130 MPW-2.
Pictures of a full wafer from the first SKY130 shuttle, a tray of bare dies, and a project bring-up from SKY130 MPW-2.

Results

The Open Source MPW Shuttle Program has been a success and we’re excited by the growth we’ve seen in this ecosystem. Since its inception, the program has launched eight shuttle runs on SKY130 and an initial test run on GF180MCU, the last of which are being packaged now. With 40 slots per shuttle, we’ve manufactured 360 designs out of over 600 submissions from 19 countries around the world.Graph showing number of designs submitted to Open Source MPW shuttles across versions 1 through 8

The program has also fostered collaboration between the open source community and Google. We’ve learned valuable lessons from designers who participated in the program giving feedback and filing hundreds of bugs and pull requests. These have helped to improve each successive run and to make the platforms and tools more feature-complete.

Elsewhere in the ecosystem, we’re excited by the release of new open source PDKs from foundries like the 130nm BiCMOS process from IHP, the SOI-CMOS PDK from Minimal Fab, and also by the publication of new semiconductor research using open source PDKs. Multiple universities have incorporated open source PDKs into their curriculum, and last year, NIST adopted the SKY130 PDK to migrate their existing planarized wafer designs for nanotechnology research.

Announcing GF180MCU MPW-1

We’ve just launched a new MPW-1 shuttle for GF180MCU in our partnership with Efabless. Submissions will be accepted until December 11th, targeting delivery in early 2024.

Graph showing number of designs submitted to Open Source MPW shuttles across versions 1 through 8

Next Steps

The open source silicon ecosystem is continuing to grow and evolve. After GF180 MPW-1 concludes, the open source SKY130 and GF180MCU PDKs will be joining the Linux Foundation’s CHIPS Alliance under a new working group to foster continued open source PDK development, and we expect future PDK releases will join as well. This will help with the transition to a broader governance model that enables more participation by industry, academia and the community, opening the possibility for larger shuttle programs with multiple sponsors as the ecosystem continues to grow.

Low-cost manufacturing options will continue to be available through this transition, both through commercial shuttle offerings like Efabless’ ChipIgnite program and also through educational efforts like TinyTapeout.

Thank you

Lastly, we’d like to thank the open source community. Your feedback has been invaluable to the success so far, and has helped to improve the tools and documentation to be more user-friendly. We have also seen contributions from the community in the form of hundreds of new and fully manufacturable designs, which have helped to expand the range and capabilities of open source hardware available to the community. We look forward to continuing partnerships to build a thriving ecosystem around open source silicon.

By Aaron Cunningham – Technical Program Manager, Core Hardware Tools

OpenTitan RTL freeze

We are excited to announce that the OpenTitan® coalition has successfully reached a key milestone—RTL freeze of its first engineering sample release candidate! A snapshot of our high quality, open source silicon root of trust hardware implementation has been released for synthesis, layout and fabrication. We expect engineering sample chips to be available for lab testing and evaluation by the end of 2023.

This is a major achievement that represents the culmination of a multi-year investment and long-term, coordinated effort by the project’s active community of commercial and academic partners—including Google, G+D Mobile Security, ETH Zurich, Nuvoton, Winbond, Seagate, Western Digital, Rivos, and zeroRISC, plus a number of independent contributors. The OpenTitan project and its community are actively supported and maintained by lowRISC C.I.C., an independent non-profit.

Hitting this milestone demonstrates that large-scale engineering efforts can be successful when many organizations with aligned interests collaborate on an open source project. It also matters because traditionally, computing ecosystems have had to depend heavily on proprietary hardware (silicon) and software solutions to provide foundational, or “root,” trust assurances to their users. OpenTitan fundamentally changes that paradigm for the better, delivering secure root of trust silicon technology which is open source, high quality, and publicly verifiable.

Our belief is that core security features like the authenticity of the root of trust and the firmware it executes should be safely commoditized rights guaranteed to the end user—not areas for differentiation. To that end, we have made available a high-quality, industrial strength, reusable ecosystem of OpenTitan blocks, top-levels, infrastructure, and software IP adaptable for many use cases, delivered under a permissive, no-cost license and with known-good provenance. OpenTitan's now-complete, standalone “Earl Grey” chip implementation, design verification, full-chip testing, and continuous integration (CI) infrastructure are all available on GitHub today.

Flowchart illustrating the silicone process and OpenTitan

The silicon process and OpenTitan

This release means the OpenTitan chip digital design is complete and has been verified to be of sufficiently high quality that a tapeout is expected to succeed. In other words, the logical design is judged to be of sufficient maturity to translate into a physical layout and create a physical chip. The initial manufacturing will be performed in a smaller batch, delivering engineering samples which allow post-silicon verification of the physical silicon, prior to creating production devices in large volume.


Earl Grey: Discrete implementation of OpenTitan

Design Verification

Industrial quality implementation has been a core tenet of the OpenTitan project from the outset, both to ensure the design meets its goals—including security—and to ensure the first physical chips are successful. OpenTitan’s hardware development stages ensure all hardware blocks go through several gating design and verification reviews before final integration signoff. This verification has required development of comprehensive testbenches and test infrastructure, all part of the open source project. Both individual blocks and the top-level Earl Grey design have functional and code coverage above 90%—at or above the standards of typical closed-source designs—with 40k+ tests running nightly and reported publicly via the OpenTitan Design Verification Dashboard. Regressions are caught and resolved quickly, ensuring design quality is maintained over the long term.

Software tooling

OpenTitan has led the way in making open source silicon a reality, and doing so requires much more than just open source silicon RTL and Design Verification collateral. Successful chips require real software support to have broad industry impact and adoption. OpenTitan has created generalizable infrastructure for silicon projects (test frameworks, continuous integration infrastructure, per-block DIFs), host tools like opentitantool to support interactions with all OpenTitan instances, and formal releases (e.g. the ROM to guarantee important security functionality such as firmware verification and ownership transfer).

Documentation

A good design isn’t worth much if it’s hard to use. With this in mind, thorough and accurate documentation is a major component of the OpenTitan project too. This includes a Getting Started Guide, which is a ‘from scratch’ walkthrough on a Linux workstation, covering software and tooling installation, and hardware setup. It includes a playbook to run local simulations or even emulate the entire OpenTitan chip on an FPGA.

Furthermore, OpenTitan actively maintains live dashboards of quality metrics for its entire IP ecosystem (e.g. regression testing and coverage reports). If you’re new to open source silicon development, there are comprehensive resources describing project standards for technical contribution that have been honed to effectively facilitate inter-organizational collaboration.

Thriving open source community

OpenTitan’s broad community has been critical to its success. As the following metrics show (baselined from the project’s public launch in 2019), the OpenTitan community is rapidly growing:

  • More than eight times the number of commits at launch: from 2,500 to over 20,000.
  • 140 contributors to the code base
  • 13k+ merged pull requests
  • 1.5M+ LoC, including 500k LoC of HDL
  • 1.8k Github stars

Participating in OpenTitan

Reaching this key RTL freeze milestone is a major step towards transparency at the very foundation of the security stack: the silicon root of trust. The coordinated contributions of OpenTitan’s project's partners—enabled by lowRISC’s Silicon Commons™ approach to open source silicon development—are what has enabled us to get here today.

This is a watershed moment for the trustworthiness of systems we all rely on. The future of free and open, high quality silicon implementations is bright, and we expect to see many more devices including OpenTitan top-levels and ecosystem IP in the future!

If you are interested in contributing to OpenTitan, visit the open source GitHub repository or reach out to the OpenTitan team.

By Cyrus Stoller, Miguel Osorio, and Will Drewry, OpenTitan – Google

Google and NIST partner on nanotechnology development platform

We’re proud to announce Google’s cooperative research and development agreement with the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to develop an open source testbed for nanotechnology research and development for American universities. NIST—a bureau of the U.S. Department of Commerce—will start by migrating their existing planarized wafer designs to an open source framework, which can be manufactured in the U.S. on SkyWater Technologies’ open source 130nm process (SKY130). The physical wafers and source code will be available in the coming months. Together, NIST, Google, and the open source community will develop designs to facilitate research into both basic and applied science, including technology transfer into production with U.S. manufacturers.

Furthering Google’s goals to improve access to semiconductor technology, this agreement will provide academic researchers with unprecedented resources from a semiconductor foundry to enhance research into the physics of semiconductors and nanodevices. This includes their chemistry, defects, electrical properties, high frequency operation, and switching behavior, while reducing overall costs through economies of scale. Most importantly, this access enhances the technology transfer process by enabling researchers to develop new and emerging technologies using foundry resources, that can then be seamlessly transitioned into mass production since universities will already be using an industrially relevant platform. This will greatly improve scientist’s ability to move their technologies through the tech-transfer “valley of death” and into practical use.

Nanotechnology research has benefitted from silicon wafers that are normally used for chip manufacturing in a unique way. Instead of turning them into packaged microchips, their smooth, planarized surface makes a great substrate for building and testing nanoscale structures. This likewise helps test their transition into mass production.

Picture of a full wafer using the SKY130 open source PDK.

Picture of a full wafer using the SKY130 open source PDK.


The wafer for this platform has a number of different metrology structures, from parametric test structures based on simple transistor arrays—which can be probed in a probe station—to thousands of complex measurements that users can operate using synthesized digital circuits. Critically, the wafers will be available to universities in a 200 mm form factor, and mid-production planarized wafers with less than a single nanometer of surface roughness. Smooth, flat surfaces are critical for advanced manufacturing at small sizes.

NIST researchers are also ensuring that the wafers have photolithographic and electron beam alignment marks commonly found in university nanofabrication facilities, allowing the foundry silicon to be used directly by university researchers with ease. Metal pads on the surface will allow scientists to access the semiconductor transistors from the surface.

NIST scientists anticipate the nanotechnology accelerator platform will enhance scientific investigations into a diverse set of technologies, including memory devices (resistive switches, magnetic tunnel junctions, flash memories), artificial intelligence, plasmonics, semiconductor bioelectronics, thin film transistors and even quantum information science.

Picture of a development die from Google 's OpenMPW program for the nanotechnology accelerator developed by NIST and the University of Michigan

Picture of a development die from Google 's OpenMPW program for the nanotechnology accelerator developed by NIST and the University of Michigan

This program also benefits from Google’s previous contributions and support of the GDSFactory and OpenFASOC open source projects that help automate and shorten the construction of these important measuring devices from months to days. Ahead of the full wafer tapeout in 2023, NIST scientists, working with partners at the University of Michigan, Carnegie Mellon, University of Maryland, The George Washington University, and Brown University have been using Google's OpenMPW program to develop and test preliminary circuits which they expect to include in the nanotechnology accelerator. Preliminary testing will help ensure the program’s goals are met with working circuits that best serve the scientific community.

A key factor in cutting-edge research is reproducibility, or the ability for researchers from different institutions to repeat each other’s experiments and improve upon them. By migrating to an open source framework, researchers can more easily share reproducible results, contribute to the creation of open source datasets to enhance future simulation, and advance the scientific community’s state of the art of nanotechnology and semiconductor manufacturing.

NIST and Google will distribute the first production run of wafers to leading U.S. universities. Post-program, American scientists will be able to directly purchase the wafers from Skywater without license requirements, giving them the freedom to pursue their research without any restrictions. Since wafers are hundreds of times cheaper than full mask-sets or the cost of designing integrated circuits from scratch, scientists will have a much easier time getting and using this powerful industrial technology. Longer term, working with NIST to develop future platforms on the recently announced SKY90FD open source PDK will further expand this R&D ecosystem.

To kick off this research effort NIST is organizing the "NIST Integrated Circuits for Metrology Workshop" from September 20–21, 2022. This workshop will be held online with a series of presentations and panel discussions on the first day. During the second day, a working group of researchers, scientists and engineers will work to focus on the creation of parametric test structures for monolithic integration using open source silicon technology. Visit the event website to get more details about this program and register to attend or learn more about presenting.

By Ethan Mahintorabi and Johan Euphrosine, Software Engineers – Hardware Toolchains Team, and Aaron Cunningham, Technical Program Manager – Google Open Source Programs Office

GlobalFoundries joins Google’s open source silicon initiative

Over the last year we have been busy planning the expansion of our free open source silicon design and manufacturing program to further grow the community of developers and companies building custom silicon, and build a thriving ecosystem around open source hardware.

Today, we’re excited to announce an expansion of this program and our partnership with GlobalFoundries. Together, we're releasing the Process Design Kit (PDK) for the GlobalFoundries 180MCU technology platform under the Apache 2.0 license, along with a no-cost silicon realization program to manufacture open source designs on the Efabless platform. This open source PDK is the first result of our ongoing partnership with GF. Based on the scale and breadth of GF’s technology and manufacturing expertise, we expect to do more together to further access and innovation in semiconductor development and manufacturing.
GF180MCU 1P5M 5 metals stack-up, 9kA top metal, with MIM between M3 and M4 layers.
Google started this program with SkyWater Technologies, by releasing one of their PDKs under the Apache 2.0 license. We sponsored six shuttle runs over the course of two years, allowing the open source community to submit more than 350 unique designs of which around 240 were manufactured at no-cost.
We cannot understate the milestone that this new partnership represents in the foundry ecosystem market.

Over the past few years, the world has experienced an unprecedented acceleration of adoption of digital capabilities—driven by the pandemic, and technology megatrends that have shifted every aspect of human life. According to GlobalFoundries, this has led to roughly 73% of foundry revenue being associated with high growth markets such as mobile, IoT, and automotive. This transition has not only given rise to a “New Golden Age” of semiconductors but also a tectonic shift in how we define and deliver innovation as an industry.  

Specifically, applications using 180nm are at a global capacity of 16+ million wafers a year and bound to grow to 22+ million wafers in 2026, according to GlobalFoundries.

The 180nm application space continues to see strong market traction in motor controller, RFID, general purpose MCUs and PMIC, along with emerging applications such as IoT Sensors, Dual Frequency RFID and Motor Drive.

The collaboration between GlobalFoundries and Google will help drive innovation for the application and silicon engineers designing in these high growth areas, and is an unambiguous affirmation of the viability of the open source model for the foundry ecosystem.

The GF 180nm technology platform offers open source silicon designers new capabilities for high volume production, affordability, and more voltage options. This PDK includes the following standard cells
  • Digital standard cells libraries (7-track and 9-track)
  • Low (3.3V), Medium (5V, 6V) and High (10V) voltage devices
  • SRAM macros (64x8, 128x8, 256x8, 512x8)
  • I/O and primitives (Resistors, Capacitors, Transistors, eFuses) cells libraries
Open sourcing more PDKs is a critical step in the development of the open source silicon ecosystem:
  • Open source EDA tools can now add support for multiple process technologies.
  • Researchers can produce fully-reproducible designs against multiple technology baselines.
  • Popular open source IP blocks can be ported to different process technologies.
We cannot build this on our own, we need you: software developers and hardware engineers, researchers and undergrad students, hobbyists and industry veterans, new startups and industry players alike, to bring your fresh ideas and your proven experiences to help us grow the open source silicon ecosystem.

We encourage you to:
By Johan Euphrosine and Ethan Mahintorabi – Hardware Toolchains Team

SkyWater and Google expand open source program to new 90nm technology

Today, Google is announcing the expansion of our partnership with SkyWater Technology. We are working together to release an open source process design kit (PDK) for SKY90-FD, SkyWater’s commercial 90nm fully depleted silicon on insulator (FDSOI) CMOS process technology. SKY90-FD is based on MIT Lincoln Laboratory’s 90 nm commercial FDSOI technology, and enables designers to create complex integrated circuits for a diverse range of applications.

Over the last two years, Google and SkyWater Technology have partnered to make building open silicon accessible to all developers, starting with the open source release of the SKY130 PDK and continuing with a series of no-cost manufacturing shuttles for developers in the open source hardware ecosystem. To date, Google has sponsored six shuttles on the Efabless platform, manufacturing 240 designs from over 364 community submissions. This is the first partnership of its type ever launched, and the results to date have been impressive.
The latest MPW-6 shuttle received 90 submissions from a diverse community across 24 different countries:

Over the coming months, we'll work closely with SkyWater Technology to release their new SKY90-FD PDK under the Apache 2.0 license and organize additional Open MPW shuttles to manufacture open source designs for this new 90nm FDSOI technology, through the Efabless platform.

We believe that having access to different technologies through open source PDKs is critical to grow and strengthen the open silicon ecosystem:
  • Developers can go beyond the constraints of their familiar process nodes and explore different performance, power and area trade offs with existing or new designs.
  • Researchers can reproduce their research on different technologies to produce diverse figures of merit.
  • Tool maintainers can generalize their technologies' backends to support more than one process.
  • The community can refine the ways we structure, distribute and maintain these PDKs.
SKY90-FD is a 90nm FDSOI process. Unlike a traditional CMOS BULK process, SKY90-FD features a thin layer of insulator material between the substrate and the upper silicon layer. This thin oxide process allows the transistor to be significantly thinner than in the BULK process, allowing the device to be “fully depleted,” and simplifying the fabrication process. This extra insulation greatly reduces parasitic current leakage and lowers junction capacitances, providing improved speed and power performance under various environmental conditions.
The SKY90-FD process stack topology features 5x thin Copper base metal layers for the main interconnect and two extra thicker Al (Aluminum) metal layers capable of conducting higher current.
Google is excited about the new range of applications this open source PDK will enable once it's released later this year, and we can't wait to hear from you and watch the growing stream of innovative project ideas originating from the open silicon community.

In the meantime, make sure to check https://developers.google.com/silicon for resources and pointers to start your open silicon journey!


By Johan Euphrosine and Ethan Mahintorabi – Hardware Toolchains Team

OpenTitan at one year: the open source journey to secure silicon

During the past year, OpenTitan has grown tremendously as an open source project and is on track to provide transparent, trustworthy, and cost-free security to the broader silicon ecosystem. OpenTitan, the industry’s first open source silicon root of trust, has rapidly increased engineering contributions, added critical new partners, selected our first tapeout target, and published a comprehensive logical security model for the OpenTitan silicon, among other accomplishments.

OpenTitan by the Numbers

OpenTitan has doubled many metrics in the year since our public launch: in design size, verification testing, software test suites, documentation, and unique collaborators at least. Crucially, this growth has been both in the design verification collateral required for high volume production-quality silicon, as well as the digital design itself, a first for any open source silicon project.
  • More than doubled the number of commits at launch: from 2,500 to over 6,100 (across OpenTitan and the Ibex RISC-V core sub-project).
  • Grew to over 141K lines of code (LOC) of System Verilog digital design and verification.
  • Added 13 new IP blocks to grow to a total to 29 distinct hardware units.
  • Implemented 14 Device Interface Functions (DIFs) for a total 15 KLOC of C11 source code and 8 KLOC of test software.
  • Increased our design verification suite to over 66,000 lines of test code for all IP blocks.
  • Expanded documentation to over 35,000 lines of Markdown.
  • Accepted contributions from 52 new unique contributors, bringing our total to 100.
  • Increased community presence as shown by an aggregate of over 1,200 Github stars between OpenTitan and Ibex.
Chart that shows: One year of OpenTitan and Ibex growth on GitHub: the total number of commits grew from 2,500 to over 6,100
One year of OpenTitan and Ibex growth on GitHub: the total number of commits grew from 2,500 to over 6,100.
High quality development is one of OpenTitan’s core principles. Besides our many style guides, we require thorough documentation and design verification for each IP block. Each piece of hardware starts with auto-generated documentation to ensure consistency between documentation and design, along with extensive, progressively improving, design verification as it advances through the OpenTitan hardware stages to reach tapeout readiness.
One year of growth in Design Verification: from 30,000 to over 65,000 lines of testing source code. Each color represents design verification for an individual IP block.

Innovating for Open Silicon Development

Besides writing code, we have made significant advances in developing processes and security framework for high quality, secure open source silicon development. Design success is not just measured by the hardware, highly functional software and a firm contract between the two, with well-defined interfaces and well-understood behavior, play an important role.

OpenTitan’s hardware-software contract is realized by our DIF methodology, yet another way in which we ensure hardware IP quality. DIFs are a form of hardware-software co-design and the basis of our chip-level design verification testing infrastructure. Each OpenTitan IP block requires a style guide-compliant DIF, and this year we implemented 14 DIFs for a total 15 KLOC of C11 source code and 8 KLOC of tests.

We also reached a major milestone by publishing an open Security Model for a silicon root of trust, an industry first. This comprehensive guidance demonstrates how OpenTitan provides the core security properties required of a secure root of trust. It covers provisioning, secure boot, device identity, and attestation, and our ownership transfer mechanism, among other topics.

Expanding the OpenTitan Ecosystem

Besides engineering effort and methodology development, the OpenTitan coalition added two new Steering Committee members in support of lowRISC as an open source not-for-profit organization. Seagate, a leader in storage technology, and Giesecke and Devrient Mobile Security, a major producer of certified secure systems. We also chartered our Technical Committee to steer technical development of the project. Technical Committee members are drawn from across our organizational and individual contributors, approving 9 technical RFCs and adding 11 new project committers this past year.

On the strength of the OpenTitan open source project’s engineering progress, we are excited to announce today that Nuvoton and Google are collaborating on the first discrete OpenTitan silicon product. Much like the Linux kernel is itself not a complete operating system, OpenTitan’s open source design must be instantiated in a larger, complete piece of silicon. We look forward to sharing more on the industry’s first open source root of trust silicon tapeout in the coming months.

Onward to 2021

OpenTitan’s future is bright, and as a project it fully demonstrates the potential for open source design to enable collaboration across disparate, geographically far flung teams and organizations, to enhance security through transparency, and enable innovation in the open. We could not do this without our committed project partners and supporters, to whom we owe all this progress: Giesecke and Devrient Mobile Security, Western Digital, Seagate, the lowRISC CIC, Nuvoton, ETH Zürich, and many independent contributors.

Interested in contributing to the industry's first open source silicon root of trust? Contact us here.

By Dominic Rizzo, OpenTitan Lead – Google Cloud

OpenTitan – Open sourcing transparent, trustworthy, and secure silicon

Security begins with secure infrastructure. To have higher confidence in the security and integrity of the infrastructure, we need to anchor our trust at the foundation—in a special-purpose chip.

Today, along with our partners, we are excited to announce OpenTitan—the first open source silicon root of trust (RoT) project. OpenTitan will deliver a high-quality RoT design and integration guidelines for use in data center servers, storage, peripherals, and more. Open sourcing the silicon design makes it more transparent, trustworthy, and ultimately, secure.
The OpenTitan logo

Anchoring trust in silicon

Silicon RoT can help ensure that the hardware infrastructure and the software that runs on it remain in their intended, trustworthy state by verifying that the critical system components boot securely using authorized and verifiable code. Silicon RoT can provide many security benefits by helping to:
  • Ensure that a server or a device boots with the correct firmware and hasn't been infected by a low-level malware.
  • Provide a cryptographically unique machine identity, so an operator can verify that a server or a device is legitimate.
  • Protect secrets like encryption keys in a tamper-resistant way even for people with physical access (e.g., while a server or a device is being shipped).
  • Provide authoritative, tamper-evident audit records and other runtime security services.
The silicon RoT technology can be used in server motherboards, network cards, client devices (e.g., laptops, phones), consumer routers, IoT devices, and more. For example, Google has relied on a custom-made RoT chip, Titan, to help ensure that machines in Google’s data centers boot from a known trustworthy state with verified code; it is our system root of trust. Recognizing the importance of anchoring the trust in silicon, together with our partners we want to spread the benefits of reliable silicon RoT chips to our customers and the rest of the industry. We believe that the best way to accomplish that is through open source silicon.

Raising the transparency and security bar

Similar to open source software, open source silicon can:
  1. Enhance trust and security through design and implementation transparency. Issues can be discovered early, and the need for blind trust is reduced.
  2. Enable and encourage innovation through contributions to the open source design.
  3. Provide implementation choice and preserve a set of common interfaces and software compatibility guarantees through a common, open reference design.
The OpenTitan project is managed by the lowRISC CIC, an independent not-for-profit company with a full-stack engineering team based in Cambridge, UK, and is supported by a coalition of like-minded partners, including ETH Zurich, G+D Mobile Security, Google, Nuvoton Technology, and Western Digital.

The founding partners of the OpenTitan project

OpenTitan is an active engineering project staffed by a team of engineers representing a coalition of partners who bring ideas and expertise from many perspectives. We are transparently building the logical design of a silicon RoT, including an open source microprocessor (the lowRISC Ibex, a RISC-V-based design), cryptographic coprocessors, a hardware random number generator, a sophisticated key hierarchy, memory hierarchies for volatile and non-volatile storage, defensive mechanisms, IO peripherals, secure boot, and more. With OpenTitan, a coalition of partners have come together to deliver a more open, transparent, and high-quality RoT.
A comparison of the major design components of a traditional RoT and an OpenTitan RoT
The OpenTitan project is rooted in three key principles:
  • Transparency – anyone can inspect, evaluate, and contribute to OpenTitan’s design and documentation to help build more transparent, trustworthy silicon RoT for all.
  • High quality – we are building a high-quality logically-secure silicon design, including reference firmware, verification collateral, and technical documentation.
  • Flexibility – adopters can reduce costs and reach more customers by using a vendor- and platform-agnostic silicon RoT design that can be integrated into data center servers, storage, peripheral and other devices.

Participating in the OpenTitan project

OpenTitan will be helpful for chip manufacturers, platform providers, and security-conscious enterprise organizations that want to enhance their infrastructure with silicon-based security. Visit our GitHub repository today.

If you are interested in actively collaborating on OpenTitan to help make secure open source silicon a reality, we encourage you to contact the OpenTitan team. If you would like your product to be considered for a pilot OpenTitan RoT integration, the team would be excited to hear from you.

By Royal Hansen‎, Vice President, Google and Dominic Rizzo, OpenTitan Lead, Google Cloud