I worked on OpenTitan for around 5 years at lowRISC. It certainly has its ups and downs but it's generated some great stuff and I'm very glad to see hit proper volume production like this. Whilst there's definitely open source chips out there and lots more using bits of open source that don't actually advertise this fact I believe this is the first chip with completely open RTL that's in a major production volume use case.
One of highlights working on OpenTitan was the amount of interest we got from the academic community. Work they did could actually get factored into the first generation silicon making it stronger. Ordinarily chips like that are kept deeply under wraps and the first time the wider security community can take a look at them development has long completed so anything they might find could only effect generation 2 or 3 of the device.
Academic collaboration also helped get ahead in post quantum crypto. This first generation chip has limited capabilities there but thanks to multiple academics using the design as a base for their own PQC work there was lots to draw on for future designs.
I'm no longer at lowRISC so I don't know where OpenTitan is going next but I look forward to finding out.
> Ibex® is a small and highly configurable open-source RISC-V embedded processor available under an Apache 2.0 licence. It is formally verified and very well validated, and it has excellent toolchain integration, which has led many companies to use it in their commercial SoCs.
> [...]
> Ibex is the main CPU in the OpenTitan® root of trust, which has brought the quality of the design and documentation to new heights.
So that's neat.
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One of highlights working on OpenTitan was the amount of interest we got from the academic community. Work they did could actually get factored into the first generation silicon making it stronger. Ordinarily chips like that are kept deeply under wraps and the first time the wider security community can take a look at them development has long completed so anything they might find could only effect generation 2 or 3 of the device.
Academic collaboration also helped get ahead in post quantum crypto. This first generation chip has limited capabilities there but thanks to multiple academics using the design as a base for their own PQC work there was lots to draw on for future designs.
I'm no longer at lowRISC so I don't know where OpenTitan is going next but I look forward to finding out.
> Ibex® is a small and highly configurable open-source RISC-V embedded processor available under an Apache 2.0 licence. It is formally verified and very well validated, and it has excellent toolchain integration, which has led many companies to use it in their commercial SoCs.
> [...]
> Ibex is the main CPU in the OpenTitan® root of trust, which has brought the quality of the design and documentation to new heights.
So that's neat.