CAMBRIDGE, United Kingdom, Jan. 23, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — As the OpenTitan® project reaches maturity, it has shifted from a phase of co-creation to one of evolution and market deployment. With the introduction of silver and bronze membership tiers today, lowRISC CIC has lowered the barrier to access internal project deliverables and expertise. This will reduce the time and effort to integrate secure IP, reach production and achieve security certification of new SoCs designed by a broader range of organisations.
Background on OpenTitan
OpenTitan is a successful open-source hardware root of trust project. OpenTitan is already the world’s most active open-source silicon project, with over 250 contributors, 22,000 commits and 445,000 lines of system verilog.
From the start, lowRISC® adopted a membership-based model for OpenTitan, with a small number of committed partner organisations who invested both monetary and engineering resources to create its first implementations.
We believe that a membership model is fundamentally right for an open-source silicon hardware project, since it provides protection against IP pollution, it provides a Governing Board of committed partners steering the project, and it delivers a stable source of funds to maintain the critical engineering infrastructure for the project: servers, continuous integration systems, boards and tools.
The OpenTitan membership model has proven highly successful, with the delivery of two top level SoC designs: the Earl Grey discrete Root of Trust, and the Darjeeling integratable SoC subsystem. These designs have both gone into commercial production devices, which shows our partners’ trust in their high level of quality.
OpenTitan reaches a deployment phase
With the release of Earl Grey and Darjeeling, the OpenTitan project has entered a new phase of deployment, and many more organisations have become interested in its adoption to add security capabilities to their SoCs.
While it is possible for anyone to take an SoC to market based on OpenTitan IP, being a member brings substantial advantages, such as access to expertise from lowRISC and other OpenTitan members, as well as private deliverables created for the implementation and certification of the first OpenTitan-based SoCs.
In order to accelerate this new deployment phase, lowRISC has productised these private deliverables, which include integration documentation, tooling and checklists, as well as documentation for Common Criteria certification. In addition, it has introduced lower-cost tiers to make them accessible to a much broader range of organisations, including startups, academia and not-for-profits.
Meanwhile, lowRISC and other OpenTitan partners will continue to add new capabilities, improve existing IP blocks, develop new ones and create new top level SoC designs.
“Google is excited to see this next evolution in the OpenTitan ecosystem,” said Cyrus Stoller, Group Product Manager, Google.
OpenTitan tiers explained
| Benefits | Bronze | Silver | Gold |
| Contributors | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Working Groups | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Committers | ✓ | ✓ | |
| Technical Committee | ✓ | ✓ | |
| Governing Board | ✓ | ||
| Deliverables | Bronze | Silver | Gold |
| Contribution training | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Full DV reports | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Advanced tools settings | ✓ | ✓ | |
| Integration docs | ✓ | ✓ | |
| Certification docs | ✓ | ✓ | |
| Tapeout checklists | ✓ | ||
| Trademark use | ✓ | ||
| Early CVE reporting | ✓ |
OpenTitan now has the following membership tiers, with each tier building on the benefits of lower tiers.
Gold membership
The gold tier is intended for:
- companies who commit to using OpenTitan in their roadmaps, and therefore wish to set the direction of the project, defining its roadmap and influencing key trade-offs and design decisions
- companies who adopt a full, security-hardened OpenTitan top-level in their SoC and wish to benefit from all membership benefits, including the use of the trademark
Gold partners participate in both the Governing Board and Technical Committee, and expect to have a large number of engineers working on the project. They can use the OpenTitan trademark and get advance visibility of any security issues ahead of fixes being implemented.
Silver membership
The silver tier is aimed for semiconductor vendors who aim to integrate OpenTitan IP in their SoCs, and wish to access private deliverables and expertise to reduce their effort and time to market.
Silver partners get a seat at the Technical Committee and advanced visibility of the OpenTitan internal roadmaps. They can have multiple individuals contributing, functioning as committers.
Bronze membership
The bronze tier is aimed for organisations who only require a looser connection with the project, such as silicon vendors adopting just a few IP components, or software vendors who deliver products or services that work on OpenTitan IP.
Bronze partners get deeper visibility of the verification status and quality of OpenTitan IP blocks, as well as the necessary training and legal support to safely contribute to the project. Bronze partners can also join Working Groups to contribute to technical direction.
Tools membership
The Tools Membership tier is introduced in recognition of the contributions from EDA tools companies and AI Agent companies who provide access to their products for use in the project. It is thanks in no small part to these partners that we have professional quality engineering systems for continuous integration and validation, without which OpenTitan could not have achieved commercial quality.
Academic / NGO / Public Organization membership
This tier is free and intended for not-for-profit organizations that wish to contribute to the project for research purposes or for the benefit of the wider ecosystem. The benefits associated with this tier can be negotiated depending on the specific needs of the partner and their expected contribution.
The details of the benefits associated with these tiers may change over time, and the list will be maintained on the opentitan.org website.
If you are interested in further discussing membership of the OpenTitan project and its tiers then reach out to us at info@lowrisc.org.
About OpenTitan®
The OpenTitan Project, stewarded by lowRISC, has already commercial-quality open-source RoT devices, now in production by Nuvoton and soon to be shipping in new Google Chromebooks. OpenTitan can also be configured as an integrated SoC subsystem, and is in production at Rivos.
About lowRISC®
Founded in 2014 at the University of Cambridge Department of Computer Science and Technology, lowRISC is a not-for-profit company/CIC that provides a neutral home for collaborative engineering to develop and maintain commercial-quality 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 the hosting and management of high-quality projects like OpenTitan and Sunburst via the Silicon Commons® approach.
Media Contact
lowRISC@w2comm.com
