lowRISC Announces New OpenTitan Project Partner, zeroRISC

The OpenTitan coalition continues to expand as the technology approaches commercial availability

CAMBRIDGE, England – October 30, 2023 – lowRISC C.I.C., the open-source silicon ecosystem organization, today announced zeroRISC has joined the OpenTitan project. zeroRISC is a startup focused on providing a cloud security service for silicon that delivers transparency and trustworthiness for data centers and ICS/OT, IoT and edge devices. The company played a key role in accomplishing the first OpenTitan tapeout and is driving efforts to validate the first discrete chip and bring the device to commercial production.

Founded in April 2023, zeroRISC was established by top contributors and original project founders from Google and recently announced $5 million in seed funding led by Cambridge Angels, a leading network of U.K. angel investors. The funding will be used to deliver the first commercial all-in-one drop-in silicon, software and services solution built on the OpenTitan open-source silicon root of trust (RoT) project.

“Our formal membership in the OpenTitan project marks a significant stride towards making open secure silicon a reality,” said Dominic Rizzo, founder and CEO of zeroRISC. “At zeroRISC, we firmly believe that the safest and most secure systems will come to rely on open secure silicon, with trust and assurance built upon OpenTitan’s transparent foundations. We look forward to continuing to work together with all project partners to commercialize the first truly open-source RoT chips, a remarkable achievement for zeroRISC and a powerful testament to the success of the OpenTitan project.”

OpenTitan’s objective is a fundamental change in expectations of transparency for the silicon RoT design: in the same way a silicon RoT is foundational to building secure systems, transparency is foundational to the trustworthiness of that RoT. As the first open-source RoT, OpenTitan has democratized access to a critical component of silicon security aligned with Secure by Design and Secure by Default principles.

As OpenTitan’s non-profit host, lowRISC provides essential open-source governance, technical contributions, and structural support services for all partners. The innovative, open and collaborative methodology developed for the project – the Silicon Commons – has enabled OpenTitan to concretely demonstrate the viability of open-source chip design on par with open-source software. It has empowered diverse partners, including Winbond, Nuvoton, Seagate, Western Digital, Google, and Rivos — and now zeroRISC — to effectively collaborate and bring a critical security technology to the cusp of commercial availability.

“As OpenTitan matures and continues to hit its major implementation milestones, we are excited to welcome partners like zeroRISC, with their wealth of open-source silicon experience, skills and vision to the project,” said Ilia Stolov, General Manager of Winbond Israel. “A truly trustworthy RoT is a critical technology, especially as the regulatory environment continues to shift in favor of certifiably secure solutions for the entire silicon supply chain.”

OpenTitan’s consistent emphasis on high quality design, verification and documentation collateral puts it at the vanguard of commercially relevant open-source silicon. Its adherence to Kerckhoff’s principle stands in sharp contrast to closed RoT implementations, and represents a necessary reset of expectations of transparency in trustworthy, secure silicon.

To learn more about zeroRISC and its involvement in the OpenTitan project, visit: https://zerorisc.com/.

About lowRISC

Founded in 2018 at the University of Cambridge Computer Lab, lowRISC is a not-for-profit company/CIC that provides a neutral home for collaborative engineering to develop and maintain open source silicon designs and tools for the long term. The lowRISC not-for-profit structure combined with full stack engineering capabilities in-house enables lowRISC to manage high quality projects like OpenTitan.

About zeroRISC

Built on the OpenTitan open-source silicon root of trust project, zeroRISC is the first commercial cloud security service for silicon that delivers transparency and trustworthiness for data centers and ICS/OT, IoT and edge devices. The zeroRISC platform is the only all-in-one drop-in silicon, software and services solution that delivers trustworthy, cloud-based secure device management below the operating system, while making secure ownership transfer straightforward. Headquartered in Boston, MA, zeroRISC is backed by Cambridge Angels and is a member of the OpenTitan project. For more information, visit https://zerorisc.com/.

About OpenTitan

OpenTitan is the industry’s first open source silicon Root of Trust (RoT) project. Its objective is to make silicon RoT design and implementation more transparent, trustworthy, and secure for enterprises, platform providers, and chip makers. Developed from the start following the principles of high quality, transparency and flexibility, its components form the basis of an open silicon ecosystem and may be flexibly reused and reconfigured under the permissive Apache 2.0 license. OpenTitan top-level designs and components have extensive design verification and documentation, and are available for use in commercial systems today.