GlobalPlatform Launches Pavona Open Silicon Distribution Featuring Production-Grade Post-Quantum Cryptography
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GlobalPlatform Launches Pavona Open Silicon Distribution Featuring Production-Grade Post-Quantum Cryptography GlobalPlatform has officially launched Pavona, an open-source silicon distribution designed to deliver modular, certification-ready intellectual property (IP) blocks and reference designs for secure hardware systems. Developed by the GlobalPlatform Trusted Open Source Silicon Task Force, the project introduces a platform architecture that moves away from monolithic open silicon designs in favor of a composable framework. Supported by twelve founding corporate and academic members—including ZeroRISC, Meta, Qualcomm, Tenstorrent, and the Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy—Pavona establishes a standardized hardware root of trust with native, out-of-the-box post-quantum cryptography (PQC) accelerators for embedded architectures. Technical Architecture & Specifications / Operational Implementation The platform distribution operates as a composition engine paired with a curated, RISC-V-based IP library, allowing chip architects to select, configure, and assemble independent security subsystems. Designed to align with FIPS 140-3 and Common Criteria evaluation criteria, Pavona launches with two successfully taped-out physical reference configurations fabricated on TSMC’s 3-nanometer (N3) node: a standalone discrete root of trust chip and an integrated root of trust module tailored for modular chiplet layouts. The distribution’s embedded cryptographic hardware subsystem incorporates co-design optimizations that accelerate the newly standardized ML-KEM and ML-DSA post-quantum algorithms. Hardware-software benchmarks yield a 6- to 9-fold increase in processing performance for these lattice-based primitives on embedded systems, alongside a 36% to 75% improvement in maximum operational frequency with near-zero area overhead cost. Strategic Positioning & Ecosystem Integration Pavona establishes a community-governed hardware security foundation modeled after established open-source software governance frameworks like Yocto and Zephyr. The project operates under a two-tiered structure: a Governing Board of paying members manages operational funding, while an independent Technical Steering Committee maintains complete authority over the technical roadmap. To lower integration barriers for multi-vendor system-on-chip (SoC) projects, the repository includes automated, hardware-native continuous integration (CI) dashboards that simulate and validate custom root of trust iterations in under an hour. The tiered subscription matrix offers preferential pricing for existing GlobalPlatform members across Platinum ($80,000), Gold ($50,000), and employee-weighted Silver brackets, alongside a free Associate tier to encourage open academic research collaboration across cloud data centers, industrial IoT, and automotive control networks. You can review the official GlobalPlatform launch announcement here and access the project overview page here. For technical IP access, continuous integration telemetry dashboards, and developer getting-started documentation, visit the centralized project portal here. May 26, 2026 Mohamed Abdel-Kareem2026-05-26T07:52:33-07:00 Leave A Comment Cancel replyComment Type in the text displayed above Δ This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.