Nanolaminate, also known as Laminar armor or Laminar plating and colloquially known as Nanolam by the UNSC, is a category of materials widely used by the Covenant. Nanolaminates are ubiquitous in the Covenant as a cladding material, from weapons, armor and vehicles to starships and even architecture and everyday objects. The materials are renowned for their versatility, durability, light weight and highly advanced thermal management properties, a necessary trait due to the ubiquity of directed energy weapons in the Covenant meta-civilization. Beyond these basic traits, specific types of nanolaminate vary wildly in their properties, and their exact structural composition and features depend largely on the manufacturer's preferences as well as the intended use case; for example, a common warrior's nanolaminate armor is less than a centimeter in thickness, while that on a warship can be many meters thick and have dozens of layers.

Nanolaminate is a collection of numerous minutely thin layers of alloys, meshes and various advanced metamaterials overlaid on one another in the sophisticated manufacturing processes that characterize Covenant assembly forges and fabricators. This combination of layers results in a material that is highly versatile and multifunctional. This is also the primary requirement for its mass manufacture, as laminar sheets cannot be produced in conventional industry due to the very particular combination of nanomachines, gravitics, magnetic fields and other specialized machinery used in Covenant manufacturing processes. The various layers that comprise nanolaminate are applied in different ways, from using nanomachines to "grow" the base structure around a supporting honeycomb mesh to strands of superconducting thread embedded within the material to serve as waveguides for energy shielding as well as thermal-distributing polymer layers sprayed on to form the pearlescent sheen Covenant armor is known for. Most nanolaminates also have select programmable features, such as the ability to change color or patterns at will.

By the late 2560s, the UNSC was beginning to be able to produce small patches of a nanolaminate equivalent due to the reverse-engineering of assembly forge-like systems.