Back in 2020, the U.S. Department of Defense announced it has awarded the Rapid Assured Microelectronics Prototypes (RAMP) using Advanced Commercial Capabilities Project Phase 1 project to Microsoft and others for advancing commercial leading-edge microelectronics physical “back-end” design methods with measurable security.
Microsoft today announced that three new state-of-the-art chips were developed using the RAMP secure design capability developed by Microsoft within the Azure Government cloud environment to ensure compliance with DoD supply chain requirements.
This is the first time such chips were designed in the cloud and transmitted via the cloud to chip foundries for manufacture. Microsoft believes that this process rapidly accelerates the time to market for critical microelectronic components. This solution can also be extendable to the commercial design environment in Azure. This new RAMP solution supports just-in-time, scalable, on-demand compute and storage infrastructure, enabling significant reductions in simulation time.
At a commercial level, the microelectronics industry uses Azure to accelerate and improve the design process for chip manufacturing.
“RAMP helped us meet our design tape-out dates by deploying a tailored cluster of hardware to accelerate our design simulations in hours. Normally, the addition of new hardware on-premises can take months. Access to Azure’s performant compute enabled three times faster runtimes, ultimately ensuring we met our aggressive schedule,” said Katie Sobolewski, BAE R3 product line director.
Microsoft continues to push ahead in advancing secure design and development of critical physical systems for our infrastructure, such as semiconductors and microelectronics.
Microsoft and its RAMP commercial industry team partners will continue to bring its combined expertise and experience to transform critical missions, programs, and technologies for DoD.
