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(Arlington, VA) – The Department of Defense (DoD) announces the award of the Rapid Assured Microelectronics Prototype using Advanced Commercial Capabilities (RAMP) Project for improving Department of Defense (DoD) assured access to advanced commercial microelectronics technology.

On December 30th, 2020, the Naval Surface Warfare Center (NSWC), Crane Division, leveraged its Strategic & Spectrum Missions Advanced Resilient Trusted Systems (S²MARTS) Other Transaction Authority (OTA) via the National Security Technology Accelerator (NSTXL) consortium to award an OT agreement to Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. to begin RAMP Phase 1. In Phase 1, Qualcomm Technologies will evaluate and provide information on its current commercial chipset lifecycle best practices for assuring, adapting, and applying its state-of-the-art platforms (SOTA) to DoD missions.

RAMP is one component of the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering OUSD(R&E), Trusted and Assured Microelectronics (T&AM) program. The primary objective of RAMP is to develop a secure design and prototyping capability to demonstrate how the DoD can securely leverage State-Of-The-Art (SOTA) microelectronics technologies without depending on a closed security architecture fabrication process or facility. RAMP uses a multi-phase approach that leverages the commercial industry expertise to modernize DoD practices and demonstrate a novel capability to accomplish this objective. The focus will be on physical or “back-end” design as this part of the lifecycle is particularly challenging due to tight coupling of design methods with specific fabrication processes and facilities. Achieving this objective requires novel and innovative methods including unique, secure design environments and critical circuit modules for advanced custom ICs and System-on-Chips (SoCs). Phase 2 will demonstrate the RAMP prototype using the secure IC and SoC design resources developed in Phase 1.