GlobalPlatform Unveils Pavona, the First Open Silicon Platform with Post-Quantum Cryptography

Estimated reading time: 3 minutes

GlobalPlatform 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,” said Dominic Rizzo, Governing Board Chair, Pavona, and CEO, ZeroRISC.

Pavona 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,” said Gil Bernabeu, Chief Technology Officer, GlobalPlatform.

The founding members include Agile Analog, Analog Devices, 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.