Cobham Gaisler and fentISS have confirmed that the now-funded De-RISC project is forging ahead with its efforts to built a RISC-V based space-qualified computing platform centred in Europe, in partnership with Barcelona Supercomputing Centre and Thales.

“With the first RISC-V based, fully European platform for space, De-RISC will guarantee access to made-in-Europe technology for aerospace applications,” claims Paco Gomez Molinero, chief executive officer of fentISS and coordinator of the De-RISC project, “thus contributing to the Technologies for European Non-dependence and Competitiveness programme in these strategic markets.”

The Dependable Real-time Infrastructure for Safety-critical Computer (De-RISC) project, which was officially unveiled in early October, has a €3.4 million budget for the development of a European-native space and aviation computing platform. The four companies involved have planned out a system which uses a multi-core system-on-chip designed around the free and open RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA) by Cobham Gaisler and running the fentISS XtratuM hypervisor. Barcelona Supercomputing Centre, meanwhile, is providing multi-core interference mitigation techniques, and Thales will provide real-world testing for aerospace applications.

The project’s objective claims five key features which make De-RISC tempting over current commercial alternatives: A lack of US export restrictions; the unique multi-core interference mitigation from BSC; portability and customisability; high fault tolerance; and future-proofing compared, its maintainers claim, with older SPARC and PowerPC architectures common to space equipment today.

More information on the project is available on the EU Cordis website.