OpenTitan launches world's first open-source silicon project

Google launched OpenTitan with lowRISC and other partners in 2018 with the goal of making a completely transparent and secure silicon platform. They conceived OpenTitan as the world’s first open-source secure chip to include commercial-grade design verification, top-level testing and continuous integration. Its design ensures 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 only authorised and verifiable code.

This announcement represents the culmination of five years of collaboration and investment by the OpenTitan Coalition, which comprises members such as Winbond, Nuvoton, zeroRISC, Rivos, Western Digital, Seagate, ETH Zurich, and G+D Mobile Security. The project was hosted by non-profit lowRISC.

“I am incredibly proud of the OpenTitan partnership for succeeding where every other project has failed – producing the first commercial quality open-source chip in the world,” said Dr. Gavin Ferris, CEO of lowRISC. “This is the culmination of the monumentally hard work of a vibrant and engaged community of contributors focused on a singular goal to achieve what’s never been done before – make open-source silicon work the same way as open-source software. I am grateful for this support and can’t wait for what’s to come.”

This announcement follows previopus milestones including the completion of the first discrete silicon tapeout in June 2023. Meanwhile in November 2023, the coalition announced the first SoC secure execution environment, including RoT functionality, which has enabled coalition partners to embed OpenTitan in their SoC and chiplet designs.

Next up, the plan is to complete the full production release of the “Darjeeling” integrated OpenTitan secure execution environment (SEE) and the first production release of ‘Chai,’ the integrated OpenTitan SEE with support for secure external flash.