CrossBar Joins Pavona: Building the Open, Composable Future of Secure Silicon
Pavona brings together production-ready IP, post-quantum cryptography, and community governance to accelerate the adoption of trustworthy secure silicon.
The CrossBar Team
6/3/20264 min read
CrossBar is proud to be a founding member of Pavona, the new open-source silicon distribution hosted by GlobalPlatform — extending our open-hardware mission from a single chip to an entire ecosystem.
1. What Pavona Is
On May 26, 2026, GlobalPlatform launched Pavona, the first open-source silicon distribution to ship with production-grade post-quantum cryptography. CrossBar is one of twelve founding members of the initiative, joining Agile Analog, Analog Devices, Baochip, the Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy, Meta, the University of Oxford, SIMPLE Crypto Association, Qualcomm Technologies, Tenstorrent, Winbond, and ZeroRISC.
This is a natural next step for us. Last month, we wrote about why truly open hardware matters for the crypto industry and the work we have done to make a single security chip auditable from RTL to fabricated silicon. Pavona takes that same principle — don’t trust, verify — and scales it across an entire industry.
Pavona is an open-source silicon distribution: a curated library of reusable IP, a composition engine, reference top-level designs, and the tooling, CI infrastructure, and governance needed to use them in real products. Think of it as what Linux did for software, applied to secure silicon.
A few things make Pavona different from anything that has come before it:
Composable, not monolithic. Instead of a single chip design, Pavona offers a curated IP library — security cores, root of trust, crypto and PQC accelerators, interconnect and peripherals, system services — and a configuration engine that lets integrators select, configure, and compose subsystems tailored to their architecture, whether that is a datacenter accelerator, an automotive controller, or a resource-constrained IoT device.
Silicon-proven. Pavona launches with two successfully taped-out reference designs: a standalone chip root of trust and an integrated root of trust for chiplet architectures fabricated at TSMC 3nm (N3), with additional silicon-proven designs at 40nm. This is not a research project — it is production-ready on day one.
Post-quantum from day one. Pavona ships with the first openly available production-grade PQC stack for embedded silicon, including SLH-DSA, ML-KEM, and ML-DSA. With the earliest PQ migration deadlines arriving in 2030, this matters now, not later.
Standards-aligned. The distribution is built with FIPS 140–3, SESIP, and Common Criteria certification requirements in mind, so what you build with Pavona has a clear path to certified, mass-market deployment.
Community-governed. Pavona is hosted by GlobalPlatform but technically directed by an independent Technical Steering Committee, with a charter modeled on Yocto and Zephyr. No single vendor controls the roadmap.
The full IP repository, reference designs, continuous integration dashboards, and getting-started documentation are available today at www.pavona.org. A new contributor can build and simulate a reference root of trust in under an hour.
2. Why CrossBar Is In
CrossBar has been building toward this moment for years. Our Daric (internal codename of CrossBar Chip 1) — a 22nm ReRAM-based Security Processing Unit with publicly available RTL under CERN-OHL-W — was an early demonstration that production-worthy and genuinely open are not mutually exclusive. The same chip became the test vehicle for IRIS inspection, the non-destructive technique that lets researchers visually confirm that what was fabricated matches what was designed.
Pavona is where this work scales. Our ReRAM-based solutions — built for embedded security applications and blurring the boundary between MCU and Secure Element — slot directly into Pavona’s composable framework for root of trust, supply-chain security, and side-channel-resistant cryptography. The fit is technical, but it is also philosophical.
Mark Davis, CEO of CrossBar, Inc., commented on the significance of the collaboration:
3. What This Means for the Industry
— Mark Davis
CEO, CrossBar, Inc.
4. Get Involved
CrossBar will be contributing technology, expertise, and engineering effort to the Pavona ecosystem alongside our continued investment in the Daric platform and the broader CrossBar open-source program. If you are an integrator, a researcher, a developer, or an organization that builds connected systems and cares about verifiable hardware security, we encourage you to explore the project directly:
Visit www.pavona.org for the repository, getting-started guide, and CI dashboards
Read the Pavona launch announcement from GlobalPlatform
Review our prior work on open silicon in CrossBar and the World’s True Open Source Hardware for Crypto Wallet
Explore the CrossBar Daric SDK and Daric Hardware repositories on GitHub
Open silicon is no longer a thought experiment. With Pavona, it is a distribution you can clone, configure, and ship. We are excited about what the community will build with it — and proud to be helping lay the foundation.
— The CrossBar Team
“CrossBar is creating a new class of ReRAM-based solutions for embedded security applications, blurring the boundary between MCU and SE. Pavona’s open, composable security framework provides an ideal addition for root of trust, supply-chain security, and general side-channel resistant cryptography. It also matches perfectly with our Open Source approach. We’re excited to contribute to an ecosystem where hardware innovation and security standards move forward together.”
For years, the hardware security industry has run on a paradox: the devices most responsible for protecting secrets have been the ones least available for inspection. Open RTL, open tooling, and standards-aligned governance change that — and Pavona brings all three together with the production rigor that real products demand.
For the crypto community, the implication is direct. Hardware wallets, key management devices, and secure signing infrastructure can now be assembled from auditable, certification-ready IP, with post-quantum readiness built in from the silicon up. For the broader connected world — automotive, industrial, AI accelerators, chiplet systems, IoT — the same building blocks are available, governed by the community rather than locked behind a single vendor’s roadmap.
This is what we meant when we said open source is not just a licensing choice. It is a trust model. Pavona makes that trust model deployable at scale.