Trusted Silicon Stratus - Supply Chain Risk Management Cloud (TSS-SCRM)

The DoD’s relative obscurity of consumption within the semiconductor market has put DoD semiconductor design teams in an increasingly intractable position of engineering effectiveness, cost efficiencies, design productivity, and general viability to maintain future competitiveness in trusted microelectronics. The semiconductor supply chain is an amalgam of complex, highly inter-organization design engineering and manufacturing processes, defined by four primary identity profiles: (1) silicon foundries (manufacturing), (2) Electronic Design Automation (EDA) ISVs (software), (3) Intellectual Property (IP) providers, and (4) Integrated Circuit (IC) design engineers. While the (a) pre-manufacture, (b) manufacture, and (c) post-manufacturing acquisition phases in the semiconductor supply chain are clearly sequential processes, from a “trust” perspective, each of these phases are exceedingly inter-dependent and conspicuously exposed to tamper, compromise, and opaque hardware Trojans that can affect in-circuit fatigue and failure. The problem of SCRM for the US DoD for microelectronics is unique and represents a series of necessary secure Life Cycle Management (LCM) implementations that are non-existent in the commercial industry.

Weapon system costs and schedules are also impacted by the fact that DoD and commercial IC component complexities and design infrastructure requirements are comparable and must be replicated by each DoD design team across organizational boundaries but without opportunity for collaborative, cross-DoD resource sharing. The disparate, effectively independent, if not isolated, nature of existing DoD IC design infrastructure prohibits leveraging economies of scale and restricts collaboration between DoD & A&D contractor teams.

The Trusted Silicon Stratus Supply Chain Risk Management Cloud (TSS SCRM Cloud) is a DIACAP-compliant, multi-tenancy, inter-organizational, collaborative, trusted microelectronics (ASIC, FPGA, & SoC) Supply Chain Risk Management (SCRM) ecosystem (Figure 1), that provisions a Design-To-Release-Manufacturing-to-operational-to-Life-Cycle-Management (LCM) cloud computing infrastructure & enterprise architecture. Electronic Design Automation (EDA) software and Integrated Circuit (IC) data repositories are implemented as a PRIVATE cloud computing WorkFlow-as-a-Service (WFaaS) for DoD R&D teams, contractors, and research laboratories. Included in the TSS SCRM WFaaS capability, the TSS SCRM Cloud incorporates a Digital-Rights-Management-as-a-Service (DRMaaS) architecture for DoD trusted semiconductor Intellectual Property (IP) System-on-Chip (SoC) capability for highly integrated DoD weapons platforms that have generational deployment life spans.