GlobalPlatform Launches Pavona: The First Open Silicon Distribution with Production-Grade Post-Quantum Cryptography

Insider BriefPRESS RELEASE — GlobalPlatform today launched Pavona, an open-source silicon distribution that delivers production-quality, certification-ready IP components and reference top-level designs — including the first openly available post-quantum cryptography (PQC) stack for embedded silicon. The distribution includes two successfully taped-out reference designs—a standalone chip root of trust and an integrated root of trust for chiplet architectures fabricated at TSMC 3nm (N3). Pavona provides a composable framework for building secure-by-default silicon aligned with FIPS 140-3 and Common Criteria certification requirements. Twelve founding members have already committed to the initiative, spanning semiconductor manufacturers, AI companies, academic research institutions, and IP providers. The full IP repository, top-level designs, continuous integration dashboards and getting-started documentation are available today at www.pavona.org. “The world faces a rising tide of cyber insecurity, with mounting costs from devices that are fundamentally untrustworthy and vulnerable from design through decommissioning. The foundational answer is secure silicon — and silicon itself is becoming critical infrastructure. Pavona is the home for composable open-source secure silicon: a standards-aligned ecosystem bringing together the world’s leading experts across industry, academia, and open-source. Trustworthy chip security should be easy to integrate, accessible to all, and independently governed — never locked inside proprietary, single-vendor implementations. That matters more than ever as supply chains fragment, AI scales, and the post-quantum migration arrives.”“Pavona was designed for collaboration from day one: clear getting-started guides, hardware-native CI, a Yocto-inspired governance model, and silicon-proven designs. This is the maturation of years of open-source silicon development, built for scale. Pulling this coalition together has been the most rewarding part of the last year, and we’re thrilled to see what everyone builds.”— Dominic Rizzo, Governing Board Chair, Pavona, and CEO, ZeroRISCPavona grew out of the GlobalPlatform Trusted Open Source Silicon Task Force, which identified the need for a neutral, community-governed framework that moves beyond single-use, monolithic open-source silicon designs toward a platform that scales across markets and applications. Unlike monolithic chip designs, Pavona introduces a modular distribution model — a composition engine and curated IP library that enables integrators to select, configure, and assemble open silicon subsystems tailored to their specific architecture, whether for datacenter servers, AI accelerators, automotive controllers, or resource-constrained IoT devices.At Real World Crypto 2026 in Taipei, ZeroRISC, the Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy, and Academia Sinica presented results from a multi-year hardware-software co-design collaboration demonstrating 6–9x performance improvements for the newly standardized ML-KEM and ML-DSA post-quantum algorithms on embedded silicon, with 36–75% improvements in maximum operating frequency at near-zero area cost. That work is included in the Pavona distribution from the very start. The full classical and post-quantum cryptographic stack ships from day one, making Pavona the first open-source silicon platform to deliver production-grade PQC out of the box.Hosted by GlobalPlatform, Pavona is supported by a Governing Board of contributing members who fund the project’s operations, while an independent Technical Steering Committee holds sole responsibility for the project’s technical roadmap and oversight. The project’s charter is modeled on successful open-source governance frameworks such as Yocto and Zephyr, combining lightweight community-driven development with GlobalPlatform’s deep experience in commercial standards and mass-market certification.“Open-source silicon has reached an inflection point and is becoming a common way to collaborate across the IoT ecosystem. The GlobalPlatform Trusted Open Source Silicon Task Force demonstrated that the industry is ready for a neutral framework that combines community-driven open-source silicon development with certification-ready design and the standards infrastructure required for commercial adoption. Pavona brings that vision to life under GlobalPlatform, drawing on our experience in standards used in mass-market, certified products, much as Linux enabled open-source software to move from research into production environments. We are proud to host this initiative, which will accelerate the development, integration, and adoption of root-of-trust-based open-source silicon.”— Gil Bernabeu, Chief Technology Officer, GlobalPlatformThe founding members include Agile Analog, Analog Devices, Inc. (ADI), Baochip, CrossBar, the Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy, Meta, Qualcomm Technologies, SIMPLE Crypto Association, Tenstorrent, the University of Oxford, Winbond Electronics, and ZeroRISC. Additional organizations are expected to announce participation in the coming weeks.“Analog IP is the critical bridge between the digital security domain and the physical world. Agile Analog’s configurable analog IP, including tamper prevention and tamper detection IP, provides the essential physical security layer to protect Pavona’s digital security stack, strengthening the physical hardware security. We’re excited to bring our process-portable analog capabilities into an open ecosystem with this level of security rigor.”— Chris Morrison, VP of Product Marketing, Agile Analog“ADI’s security foundations give our customers a practical, silicon-ready root of trust anchoring identity, secure boot, and lifecycle protection for the Intelligent Edge. Pavona complements our efforts to provide transparent and certification-aligned production-grade IP into digital and mixed-signal designs without compromising flexibility or time to market. That combination accelerates adoption and strengthens trust in the devices that connect the digital world to the physical one.”— Stephane Di Vito, Head of Product Security Architecture, ADI“Hardware security needs openness and transparency more than ever in today’s globalized supply chain. End users – be they governments, corporations, or individuals – have a right to know what is safeguarding their secrets. They also have a right to clarity and transparency in the bodies governing hardware security standards. Pavona delivers the coalition that all of us need to have confidence that our best interests are being served.”— Andrew “bunnie” Huang, Founder, Baochip “CrossBar is creating a new class of ReRAM-based solutions for embedded security applications, blurring the boundary between MCU and SE. Pavona’s open, composable security framework provides an ideal addition for root of trust, supply-chain security, and general side-channel resistant cryptography. It also matches perfectly with our Open Source approach. We’re excited to contribute to an ecosystem where hardware innovation and security standards move forward together.”— Mark Davis, CEO, CrossBar “Our collaboration on post-quantum cryptography for Pavona demonstrates what the open-source silicon model uniquely enables: peer-reviewed research with a direct path to commercial-grade integration. Novel research gets refined to meet the constraints that commercial silicon actually faces — code size, power budgets, certification requirements — and researchers get to see their work shipped in real products. That production-quality platform then serves as the starting point for the next round of research — Pavona makes that feedback loop concrete.”— Peter Schwabe, Research Group Leader, Applied Cryptography, Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy “Pavona launches with a top-level integrated root of trust design that has already been successfully taped out for chiplet architectures at TSMC 3nm. In the AI era, security of every silicon component matters, and having an open, auditable root of trust with production-grade post-quantum cryptography enables designers to incorporate security across the spectrum from client to server.”— David Ramku, Director, Ecosystems and Technical Operations, Meta“Qualcomm Technologies sees open-source hardware as a near-term enabler in our SoC security roadmap—bringing transparent, certification-aligned root-of-trust components that accelerate scale and strengthen trust across the ecosystem. Leveraging shared, production-ready IP at scale, allows us to deploy secure-by-design solutions across segments we serve, while aligning with emerging industry standards and interoperability requirements.”— Dan O’Loughlin, Vice President, Engineering, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc.“Modern cryptography relies fundamentally on algorithm transparency, falsifiable claims and public scrutiny to instill confidence in its security guarantees. Yet, when moving from algorithms to implementations, which additionally have to resist physical attacks, these principles are often abandoned in favor of obscurity, without clear evidence for the long-term security benefits of closed-source implementations. SIMPLE Crypto develops open-source hardware and software implementations engineered for side-channel and fault resistance, as required to move from mathematical specifications to certified silicon that can be safely deployed. Pavona is a natural place for commercial-scale adoption of this work: an independent technical governance model, a production-grade PQC stack already in place, and a certification path that makes leakage-resilient primitives not just desirable but deployable. We’re contributing to help ensure that open silicon implements the right algorithms — and implements them in a way that holds up in the lab.”— Prof. François-Xavier Standaert, Founder, SIMPLE Crypto Association“Chiplet architectures only work if every tile in the package can be trusted. Pavona gives the open chiplet ecosystem a certified, silicon-proven root of trust that’s aligned with what we’re building with Open Chiplet Atlas (OCA). Open compute needs open security — not security controlled by one company. This is the right approach.”— Jim Keller, CEO, Tenstorrent“As confidential computing becomes a cornerstone of trustworthy cloud systems, researchers need to examine its core components, present constraints, and upcoming challenges more closely. Pavona is well suited to support a deeper understanding of modern confidential computing by fostering an open ecosystem around one of its most fundamental yet least understood elements: the silicon root of trust. This kind of ecosystem would encourage ideas to move naturally between high-level concepts and the lower-level building blocks that are often hidden from view – something that is currently lacking in hardware security research.”— Amro Awad, Associate Professor of Engineering Science, University of Oxford“Open source creates trust through transparency, interoperability, and ecosystem-wide collaboration. At Winbond, we view Secure Flash as a foundational element of resilient hardware security, protecting code, credentials, and update integrity beyond the processor boundary, while enabling secure key provisioning and strengthening the integrity of the supply chain.

Our Common Criteria EAL5+ certified Secure Flash further strengthens open-source silicon by providing trusted, persistent memory that anchors security functions and enables deployment across any manufacturing process, including the most advanced nodes. By contributing to Pavona, we support an open, certification-ready silicon framework that helps customers build secure-by-design platforms for automotive, industrial, and IoT applications.”— Ilia Stolov, Center Head of Secure Solutions, Winbond Electronics CorporationThe Pavona IP library, composition engine, and continuous integration dashboards are publicly available today. Developers can access the source repository, getting-started examples, and technical documentation at www.pavona.org The project runs full CI on every commit, and new contributors can build and simulate a reference root of trust design from the getting-started guide in under an hour.Pavona is accepting members across three tiers: Platinum, Gold, Silver, with an additional Associate tier available to non-profits and academic institutions. Paying members have representation on the Governing Board and the ability to nominate members of the Technical Steering Committee. Organizations interested in joining should visit www.pavona.orgor contact info@pavona.orgShare this article:Keep track of everything going on in the Quantum Technology Market.In one place.