Altera ITAR Compliance
Altera complies with all applicable U.S. export control laws and regulations, including the Arms Export Control Act, which includes the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (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 these 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 ITAR Design Center
- Secure server to protect design files
- Encrypted communication
- MLA covers Altera and off-shore subcontractors TSMC and Amkor
Altera has full participation in the Defense Trade Electronic Licensing System (D-Trade), the official link required by the U.S. Department of State to submit export license. 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—including avionics, missiles, modems, sensors, radios, and unmanned vehicles— may require single-event upset (SEU) immunity, lowest power, and single-chip-live-at-power-up requirements. Altera offers the following features:
- The only high-performance HardCopy ASIC with an ITAR-compliant manufacturing flow
- The security of a tamper-proof ASIC design
- The low cost and low power of an ASIC with the ease of FPGA design
- A flexible Nios® II soft processor for embedded applications
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 design migration and review with the following secure processes:
- All work at Altera remains within the on-shore 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. As illustrated in Figure 1, neither of our sub-contractors, TSMC for wafer fabrication and Amkor for packaging and final test, knows who the customer is. They also don’t know the application of the design, or that it is targeted for an ITAR application.
Figure 1. Altera ITAR Manufacturing Flow
For more information regarding Altera’s ITAR process and applicable documentation, please contact us at mil@altera.com.
