Altera's enhanced commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) initiative reduces risk and increases system reliability for military contractors. Altera’s International Traffic in Arms Regulation (ITAR) design and manufacturing flow for HardCopy® ASICs is one more example of how our enhanced COTS program helps companies meet their commitments.
Altera® HardCopy ASICs provide a unique value proposition for our U.S military contractor customers to implement designs into an ASIC using an ITAR flow. Such applications may require single-event upset (SEU) immunity, lowest power, and single-chip-live-at-power-up requirements including avionics, missiles, modems, sensors, radios, and unmanned vehicles. Altera offers the following:
- The only high-performance HardCopy ASIC with an ITAR-compliant manufacturing flow
- An ITAR design flow that is transparent to the user
- The security of a tamper-proof ASIC design
- The low cost and low power of an ASIC with the ease of FPGA design
- Flexible Nios® II soft processor for embedded applications
Altera ITAR Compliance
Altera complies with all applicable U.S. export control laws and regulations, including the Arms Export Control Act, which includes ITAR.
ITAR, administered by the U.S. Department of State, regulates the export and import of U.S. military defense related equipment, services, and information. The purpose of U.S. ITAR regulations is to ensure that foreign countries, or foreign nationals working for U.S. companies in the U.S., do not have access to any of the designs generated by military customers.
We maintain ITAR compliance and have an approved manufacturing license agreement (MLA) from the U.S. Department of State. Our well-documented ITAR process includes:
- Export Management System
- Technology Control Plan
- HardCopy ASIC design flow that includes the following:
- Secure on-shore design center
- Secure server to protect design files
- Encrypted communication
- Our MLA covers Altera and our off-shore subcontractors TSMC and Amkor
- Full participation in D-Trade (Defense Trade Electronic Licensing System), the official link required by the U.S. Department of State to submit export licenses
HardCopy ASIC ITAR Design Flow
With HardCopy ASICs, engineering teams design with Altera’s Quartus® II software, and prototype and verify their designs with Stratix® series FPGAs. When the team completes testing, they archive their design and then encrypt it. Customers send their encrypted design to Altera’s secure ITAR Design Center server, where only U.S personnel review the FPGA design and map it into a HardCopy ASIC.
We maintain security throughout the design migration and review process.
- All work at Altera remains within the on-shore U.S. ITAR Design Center
- Only U.S. personnel can access the design
- Altera retains the design only on our secure ITAR server
- The ITAR Design Center completes the design migration to a HardCopy ASIC and sends an encrypted report back to the customer’s engineering team for review before wafer fabrication and prototype
Once the customer approves the prototypes, Altera produces the HardCopy devices.
Figure 1. Altera ITAR Manufacturing Flow
Neither of our sub-contractors, TSMC for wafer fabrication and Amkor for packaging and final test, knows who the customer is, knows the application of the design, nor knows that it is targeted for an ITAR application.
We are available to discuss our ITAR process, and applicable documentation, with current and prospective customers.
