GlobalPlatform today launched Pavona, an open-source silicon chip distribution platform providing mass-producible and directly certifiable IP components and reference top-level designs—including the first publicly available embedded silicon post-quantum cryptography (PQC) stack. The distribution platform includes two successfully tape-out reference designs: a standalone chip root of trust and an integrated root of trust designed for TSMC’s 3nm (N3) chiplet architecture. Pavona provides a composable framework for building FIPS 140-3 and Common Criteria-compliant, “secure by default” silicon chips. Twelve founding members have committed to the project, including semiconductor manufacturers, AI companies, academic research institutions, and IP vendors. A complete IP repository, top-level designs, continuous integration dashboards, and starting documentation are available today at www.pavona.org .
“The world is facing increasingly serious cybersecurity threats, and the costs of inherently untrustworthy and vulnerable devices are escalating throughout their entire lifecycle, from design to obsolescence. The fundamental solution lies in secure silicon chips, which are increasingly becoming critical infrastructure. Pavona is the hub for composable open-source secure silicon chips: a standards-compliant ecosystem that brings together top global experts from industry, academia, and the open-source community. Trustworthy chip security should be easy to integrate, universally accessible, and independently governed, and should never be locked into proprietary, single-vendor implementations. This is more important than ever with supply chain fragmentation, the scaling of artificial intelligence, and the arrival of the post-quantum era.”
“Pavona has been designed to foster collaboration from the outset: clear getting started guides, hardware-native continuous integration, a Yocto-inspired governance model, and silicon-verified designs. It’s the culmination of years of open-source silicon development, built specifically for scaling. The most rewarding aspect of the past year has been bringing this consortium together, and we look forward to seeing everyone’s contributions.”
Dominic Rizzo , Chairman of the Pavona Board of Directors and CEO of ZeroRISC
Pavona originated from the GlobalPlatform Trust Open Source Silicon Chip Working Group. This group pointed out that the industry needs a neutral and community-governed framework to move beyond one-off, monolithic open source silicon chip designs and towards a platform that can scale across markets and application scenarios. Unlike monolithic chip designs, Pavona introduces a modular distribution model, including a configuration engine and a curated library of IPs. This allows system integrators to select, configure, and assemble tailored open silicon chip subsystems for specific architectures, whether it’s data center servers, AI accelerators, automotive controllers, or resource-constrained IoT devices.
At the 2026 Real-World Cryptography Workshop in Taipei, ZeroRISC, the Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy, and Academia Sinica showcased the results of their years-long collaboration on hardware and software co-design, demonstrating that the performance of the newly standardized ML-KEM and ML-DSA post-quantum algorithms on embedded silicon chips is improved by 6 to 9 times, with a 36% to 75% increase in maximum operating frequency without significantly increasing area costs. This achievement has been incorporated into the Pavona distribution from the outset. Complete stacks of traditional and post-quantum cryptography protocols are available with the product from the date of release, making Pavona the first open-source silicon chip platform to offer production-grade post-quantum cryptography (PQC) out of the box.
Pavona is hosted by GlobalPlatform and supported by a management committee comprised of contributing members who fund the project. An independent technical steering committee oversees the project’s technical roadmap and oversight. The project’s charter is modeled after successful open-source governance frameworks such as Yocto and Zephyr, combining a lightweight, community-driven development model with GlobalPlatform’s extensive experience in commercial standards and mass-market certification.
“Open source silicon has reached a turning point and is becoming a common form of collaboration in the IoT ecosystem. The GlobalPlatform Trust in Open Source Silicon Working Group demonstrates that the industry is ready for a neutral framework that combines community-driven open source silicon development with certified designs and the standard infrastructure required for commercial applications. Pavona is bringing this vision to life through GlobalPlatform, leveraging our experience in mass-market certified product standards, much like Linux enabled open source software to move from research to production. We are honored to lead this initiative, which will accelerate the development, integration, and adoption of root-of-trust open source silicon.”
Gil Bernabeu , Chief Technology Officer, GlobalPlatform
Founding members include Agile Analog , Analog Devices , Baochip , CrossBar , Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy , Meta , Qualcomm Technologies, SIMPLE Crypto Association , Tenstorrent , Oxford University , Winbond Electronics , and ZeroRISC , with more organizations expected to join in the coming weeks.
Opportunities and methods of participation
The Pavona IP library, configuration engine, and continuous integration dashboard are now officially available to the public. Developers can visit www.pavona.org to access the source codebase, introductory examples, and technical documentation. The project runs a complete continuous integration process with each commit, allowing new contributors to build and simulate a reference root of trust design in less than an hour using the introductory guide.
Pavona currently offers three membership tiers: Platinum, Gold, and Silver, in addition to an “Affiliate” tier specifically for nonprofit organizations and academic institutions. Paid members have seats on the Council and can nominate members to the Technical Steering Committee. Interested organizations can visit www.pavona.org or email info@pavona.org .
For more details, please read the full press release on GlobalPlatform.org: https://globalplatform.org/latest-news/globalplatform-launches-pavona-the-first-open-silicon-distribution-with-production-grade-post-quantum-cryptography/
About Pavona
Pavona is an open-source silicon chip solution hosted by GlobalPlatform, providing mass-producible and directly certifiable IP components for developing “secure by default” silicon chip products. Built on the RISC-V core, Pavona includes both traditional and post-quantum cryptography accelerators, providing a composable framework applicable from data centers to deeply embedded systems.
About GlobalPlatform
GlobalPlatform is a technology standards organization dedicated to enabling the efficient deployment and management of innovative digital services and devices built on the “security by design” principle. GlobalPlatform technologies are used in billions of smart cards, smartphones, wearable devices, and other connected and IoT devices.
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