De-RISC first anniversary, a H2020 project which will create the first RISC-V, fully European platform for space

“De-RISC, the Horizon 2020 project (EIC-FTI 869945) that aims to create a market-ready platform based on RISC-V for the aerospace market, celebrates its one-year anniversary.”

Valencia, November 12, 2020 - After one year of execution, De-RISC continues paving its way to power future space and aeronautical applications with European technology. The project has demonstrated a great compromise from all partners by delivering great results and advances since its kick-off.

This ambitious project will guarantee access to made-in-Europe technology for aerospace applications through the use of RISC-V Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) in its final platform. This ISA is gaining momentum due to its ability to have extensions available for specific areas of application and as a result, the avoidance of great costs for royalties.

A thrilling year

De-RISC project has been able to determine the requirements defining the technology stack consisting of software architecture, system-on-chip architecture, and flight-ready hardware platform. This was the first step to start with the technical activities of the project, which have made great progress in the past months.

On the hardware side, the project has developed the first version of the De-RISC MPSoC platform and the Performance Monitoring Unit, integrating observability (Cycle Contention Stack, Request Duration Counter) and controllability capabilities (Maximum-Contention Control Unit).

As for the software side, the consortium has succeeded in porting the first prototype of XtratuM XNG Hypervisor and LithOS, the para-virtualized guest operating system, in the NOEL-V processor. The validation activities which will generate evidence for commercialization have already started and they are expected to be assessed by the use cases implementation, introducing on-board space and aviation requirements from the start.

Future action

In the following months, the project will demonstrate the same absolute commitment that the consortium has been showing up until now so more technical innovations can be expected. The full virtualization implementation, the space pre-qualification activities or the shared resource contention analysis to minimize core interference will be the next challenges to tackle. The software tasks, on the other hand, will include the porting of RTEMS, a free open source real-time operating system, as guest operating system of XtratuM XNG, and the upgrade of the software development tools to support XNG and LithOS on NOEL-V.

The evolution of De-RISC has been formidable in the last months, gaining great popularity in the market with the inclusion of the project as a member of two relevant organizations: RISC-V International and HIPEAC. The consortium has also participated in several different events such as HiPEAC Conference, DSN, or RISC-V Global Forum, where it had the attention of different audiences, and gained good engagement in social media, specifically on Twitter and LinkedIn, where profiles have already achieved the key performance indicators for the end of the project.

The future outlook for De-RISC seems promising and it is reflected through the interest shown from different companies not only from the space market, but from the aerospace and automotive industry. The final results of this project with huge potential will have to wait until March 2022, when the consortium will be ready to supply a fully European Integrated Modular Avionics HW and SW platform.