Nuvoton Develops OpenTitan based Security Chip as Next Gen Security Solution for Chromebooks

Nuvoton Technology Corporation, a global leader in embedded controller and secure IC solutions, announced today that Google’s ChromeOS plans to use the first commercial chip built on the OpenTitan open source secure silicon design as an evolution of its security chip for Chromebooks. This is a result of years of co-development and a close partnership between the companies.

The new chip is based on OpenTitan, a commercial-grade open source silicon design that provides a trustworthy, transparent, and secure silicon platform. It will be used by Google to provide the best protection to Chromebook users. OpenTitan ensures that the system boots from a known good state using properly verified code and establishes a hardware root of trust (RoT) for a variety of system-critical cryptographic operations.

“Hardware security is something we don’t compromise on. We are excited to partner with the dream team of Nuvoton, a valued, historic, strategic partner, and lowRISC, a leader in secure silicon, to maintain this high bar of quality.” said Prajakta Gudhadhe, Sr Director, ChromeOS Platform Engineering. “Google is proud of taking an active role in helping build OpenTitan into a first of a kind open source project, and now we’re excited to see Nuvoton and lowRISC take the next big step and implement a first-of-its-kind open source chip that will protect users all over the world.”

“Nuvoton has been a reliable supplier of embedded controllers (EC) to Chromebooks and Baseboard Management Controllers (BMC) to Google servers in the past decade,” said Erez Naory, VP of Client and Security Products at Nuvoton. “We have now expanded this collaboration with Google and our other OpenTitan partners to bring a new strengthened security IC to Google products and the open market.”

With the goal of making a completely transparent and trustworthy secure silicon platform, the open source project has been developed in the past five years by the OpenTitan coalition of companies hosted by lowRISC C.I.C., the open silicon ecosystem organization. The dedication and expertise of OpenTitan’s skilled community of contributors brought this industry-leading technology to life, producing the world’s first open source secure chip with commercial-grade design verification (DV), testing, and continuous integration (CI).

“Google’s integration of OpenTitan into Chromebooks is a watershed moment — the era of commercial-grade open source silicon has truly arrived,” said Dr. Gavin Ferris, CEO of lowRISC, OpenTitan’s non-profit host organization. “It’s a fantastic validation of the Silicon Commons approach adopted by our OpenTitan project partners and proves that collaborative engineering, driven by an unerring focus on quality and transparency, can successfully deliver products meeting the most stringent security requirements.”

The OpenTitan secure silicon samples are available to the broader market through an early access program and will be in volume production by 2025.