Vietnam’s Government Cipher Committee and top telco Viettel have unveiled a secure semiconductor platform, with the VGC v1.0 chip as its first product.
In a statement on Tuesday, Viettel said the committee set the security requirements, algorithms, and evaluation criteria for the chip. Viettel’s Semiconductor Center designed the integrated circuit and produced the design.
The VGC v1.0 chip is housed in a 10-by-10-millimetre package and contains 300 million transistors. It is manufactured on a 28-nanometre CMOS process.
In testing, the chip performs encryption and decryption about 15 times faster than a software-only solution on the same task. The engineers also applied measures to protect the design before sending it to the fabrication plant, to reduce the risk of leakage or reverse engineering.
In the first quarter of 2026, the first batch of VGC v1.0 chips passed technical testing and received a certificate for use in the socio-economic sector, Viettel noted.
The chip has been used in secure USB storage devices. The next step is to use it in the national digital-signature authentication system, featuring more than 2 million certificates in circulation.
The chip design capability will support dual-use chips for artificial intelligence (AI), 6G telecoms, smart cameras, Internet of Things, drones, and robots. It can reduce dependence on imported chips in key sectors, Viettel emphasized.