CHIPS Alliance Welcomes the Caliptra Open Source Root of Trust Project

SAN FRANCISCO, December 13, 2022 – CHIPS Alliance, a Linux Foundation project and leading consortium advancing common and open hardware for interfaces, processors and systems, announced that Caliptra, the open source root of trust project founded by technology leaders AMD, Google, Microsoft and NVIDIA, has joined CHIPS Alliance to enable an open, collaborative community-driven approach to hardware security.

Caliptra is a new specification for an open source silicon root of trust (RoT) designed to meet the enhanced security requirements of modern edge and confidential computing workloads. CHIPS Alliance will oversee the open source implementation of register-transfer level (RTL) code for Caliptra that can be synthesized into current SoC designs, along with the verification suite and firmware. As part of this architecture, the open source RISC-V core hosted by the CHIPS Alliance and now relaunched as VeeR, is embedded within the Caliptra Root of Trust macro. VeeR is a true open source RISC-V core family with full RTL and verification bench all under Apache 2.0 license ready for anyone to use.

Having joined CHIPS Alliance, Caliptra will form its governance under the CHIPS Alliance Technical Steering Committee in accordance with the project’s charter, while the Caliptra hardware specification is hosted in the Open Compute Project, in a collaboration that will further tighten the bond between the CHIPS Alliance and the OCP. .

“By pushing for introducing transparency into hardware security, Caliptra’s aim coincides with that of CHIPS Alliance”, said Rob Mains, General Manager at CHIPS Alliance. “CHIPS is actively encouraging collaboration with industry, universities and individuals to build a strong open source hardware ecosystem, comprised of IP, design, EDA, and PDK’s. Caliptra is a strong addition to the overall endeavors of CHIPS, and helps further the goals of CHIPS.”

CHIPS Alliance is proud to announce that, in addition to Google and AMD which were already members related to other open source initiatives they are pursuing with CHIPS Alliance, Microsoft and NVIDIA have now also joined as Platinum and Silver members, respectively.

“Google is delighted to have Caliptra join the CHIPS Alliance and see it host the open source project, including RTL and firmware,” said Partha Ranganathan, Vice President and Technical Fellow, Google. “Furthermore, we are proud to welcome AMD, Nvidia and Microsoft as members of CHIPS Alliance and work together to drive further open source collaboration and raise the security bar in the broader Cloud industry.”

Ensuring the security of our data centers and electronic devices is critical to all of us in the industry. Having a collaborative platform to bring the best minds to complex security problems and addressing real world threats is of paramount importance. The work done within CHIPS is all under an Apache 2.0 license, which encourages collaboration and usage of the intellectual property hosted by CHIPS.

CHIPS Alliance welcomes all to join and participate in its different workgroups that covers a broad range of silicon design topics including: implementation, verification, process design kits, electronic design automation, and FPGAs to name a few. Please visit the CHIPS website at:

https://chipsalliance.org/join for more information.

About the CHIPS Alliance

The CHIPS Alliance is an organization which develops and hosts high-quality, open source hardware code (IP cores), interconnect IP (physical and logical protocols), and open source software development tools for design, verification, and more. The primary focus is to provide a barrier-free collaborative environment, to lower the cost of developing IP and tools for hardware development. The CHIPS Alliance is hosted by the Linux Foundation. For more information, visit chipsalliance.org.

About the Linux Foundation

The Linux Foundation was founded in 2000 and has since become the world’s leading home for collaboration on open source software, open standards, open data, and open hardware. Today, the Foundation is supported by more than 1,000 members and its projects are critical to the world’s infrastructure, including Linux, Kubernetes, Node.js and more. The Linux Foundation focuses on employing best practices and addressing the needs of contributors, users, and solution providers to create sustainable models for open collaboration. For more information, visit linuxfoundation.org.

About the Open Compute Project Foundation

At the core of the Open Compute Project (OCP) Community are hyperscale data center operators and industry players, joined by telecom, colocation providers and enterprise IT users, working with vendors to develop and commercialize open innovations that, when embedded in product are deployed from the cloud to the edge. The OCP Foundation is responsible for fostering, serving and seeding the OCP Community to develop new open solutions that can meet the market and shape the future. In shaping the future, OCP will continue to invest in strategic initiatives that prepare the IT ecosystem for major changes, such as AI & ML, optics, sustainable data center solutions, advanced power management and cooling techniques, composable silicon and sustainability. Learn more at www.opencompute.org.