Google has announced the start of the fabrication of a Nuvoton security chip featuring OpenTitan open-source silicon Root of Trust (RoT), the first such production-ready chip. It will soon be available in lowRISC’s Voyager 1 demo board, and later this year in Chromebooks and data centers.
We first wrote about OpenTitan open-source Root of Trust (RoT) chips in 2020 as a collaboration between Google, Seagate, Nuvoton, Western Digital, lowRISC, as well as some other companies, projects, and universities that aimed at “building a transparent, high-quality reference design and integration guidelines for silicon root of trust (RoT) chips”. OpenTitan itself reached commercial availability last year, after the first engineering samples were released in 2023, and Google now says the Nuvoton chip (yet to have a proper name) is the first production-ready OpenTitan chip.
Hardware Root of Trust (RoT) are small secure microcontrollers that are the equivalent of Certificate Authorities (CAs) to ensure the security of web content before it reaches the user. Basically, it’s used to prevent malicious software or provisioning data from infecting a computer, server, or mobile device. Since it’s fully open-source, OpenTitan will enable improved trust and transparency, and OpenTitan chips by Nuvoton and other silicon vendors might be used by more and more manufacturers over time.
Sometimes, Root of Trust is integrated into microcontrollers with a wider range of features, for instance, the STMicro’s Arm Cortex-M33-based STM32H573 supports STM32Trust TEE Secure Manager and Microchip PIC32CK SG MCU integrates an HSM (Hardware Security Module) for security.
OpenTitan chips are available now for lab testing and evaluation, and Nuvoton will start mass production in Spring 2025. Google says integration has begun in Chromebooks shipping later this year (I assume replacing the Titan-C chip used in current models), and data centers will start getting the RoT solution later this year. There’s no information on the Nuvoton website just yet apart from a press release from last year saying they were working on the chip.
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
Support CNX Software! Donate via cryptocurrencies, become a Patron on Patreon, or purchase goods on Amazon or Aliexpress
