In a press release, IBM announced that it would be working with companies from the Defense Industrial Base (DIB), Electronic Design Automation (EDA) suppliers, Non-Traditional Defense Contractors (NTDC), and academic partners to develop state-of-the-art (SOTA) microelectronics for Defense Department (DoD) use.
To address DoD’s security requirements, IBM developed an ecosystem with others in industry called the Marketplace for Advanced, Rapid, Quantifiably-assured, Trusted Semiconductors (MARQTS) for acquiring microelectronics.
“MARQTS leverages commercial innovation to develop and manufacture secure, SOTA commercial microelectronics for both U.S. government and commercial needs down to the most advanced semiconductor manufacturing performed globally today, at the dimension of five nanometers,” said IBM in the release. “The solution includes a new security scoring metric that provides a full spectrum of security requirements for each component and recommends techniques for enhancing security and improving the assurance score to help protect against evolving threats.”
The MARQTS design approach includes the ability to develop microelectronics for DoD programs across multiple foundries, to be deployed in a hybrid cloud environment, and is designed to be compatible with government-directed foundry partners to address compliance with security requirements using a continuous-authority-to-operate approach.
“In our view, securing the supply chain for SOTA microelectronics for use within DoD programs goes well beyond just moving these critical workloads to the cloud,” wrote IBM. “Our goal is for the MARQTS solution to be operational in less than two years with an enterprise capability for the entire defense sector – in line with DoD’s stated need for rapid innovation.”
