Naomi Cooper
BAE Systems and Raytheon Technologies have developed chip design capabilities on Microsoft‘s Azure cloud service as part of a Department of Defense program that aims to accelerate and secure the U.S. microelectronics industrial base.
Three new chips were created using the secure design capabilities of the Rapid Assured Microelectronics Prototypes using Advanced Commercial Capabilities project, marking the first time such chips were designed in the cloud and transmitted to foundries for production, Jason Zander, executive vice president of strategic missions and technologies at Microsoft, wrote in a blog post published Tuesday.
“Access to Azure’s performant compute enabled three times faster runtimes, ultimately ensuring we met our aggressive schedule,” said Katie Sobolewski, R3 product line director at BAE.
The defense contractor is among the 11 companies that support Microsoft’s work on the RAMP project.
RAMP complies with the DOD’s Microelectronics Quantified Assurance framework, which assesses the reliability and security of microelectronic components.
“The application of MQA on this program uncovered several opportunities to assure the security of our design,” said Van Andrews, vice president of Department 22 at Raytheon’s intelligence and space business.
Microsoft was awarded a Phase 1 other transaction award in October 2020 to develop commercial microelectronics physical “back-end” design methods.
