The constraint holding back open-source silicon has never been the RTL. It has been the gap between a reference design and a chip that ships: untested PVT corners, no certification artifacts, no CI that runs hardware in a loop, no governance that a procurement team will accept. Pavona closes that gap. GlobalPlatform launched it today with two taped-out reference designs at TSMC N3 -- a standalone chip root of trust and a chiplet-integrated root of trust -- plus a full PQC stack that is the first openly available, production-grade post-quantum cryptography implementation for embedded silicon. FIPS 140-3 and Common Criteria certification paths are built in from the start.
The mechanism is composable blocks with standardized, low-dependency interfaces. A design team picks the blocks it needs (PQC accelerator, classical crypto, secure key storage, entropy source), drops them into a top-level design, and inherits the characterization, CI dashboards, and certification evidence that Pavona maintains for the ecosystem. Hardware-native CI is first-class: containerized emulation and simulation run on every commit, the same way Yocto runs a build-and-test pass for every embedded Linux image. The founding cohort matters: Meta, Qualcomm Technologies, Tenstorrent, Analog Devices, Winbond, Baochip (Bunnie Huang), ZeroRISC, Max Planck Institute, University of Oxford. These are not advisory board names. They are the silicon teams that will pull Pavona blocks into real designs and contribute back.
The loser is monolithic proprietary root-of-trust IP. The business model for closed PQC and security IP has depended on the high cost of getting a block from reference design to tapeout-ready with certification evidence. Pavona just reduced that cost to a Git clone and a CI run. Security IP vendors who have not built their differentiation on silicon-level performance or certification services will find their pricing model broken within 24 months as hyperscaler and IoT teams standardize on composable open blocks rather than single-vendor licenses.