Cobham Gaisler and fentISS Deepen Collaboration around RISC-V

Spanish software company fentISS and Swedish hardware developer Cobham Gaisler collaborate to promote computing solutions.

GOTHENBURG, Sweden, 9 December 2020 -- Cobham Gaisler, a leading space design center of Cobham Advanced Electronic Solutions (CAES), announced at the RISC-V Summit today that fent Innovative Software Solutions (fentISS), a developer of software solutions specifically designed for critical real-time embedded partitioned systems, has agreed to mutually promote flagship products NOEL-V and LEON5 processors and the XtratuM Next Generation (XNG) hypervisor.

Promoting an open technology ecosystem with this collaboration, the two European companies have recognized an increasingly aligned value set and agenda with a strong focus on the RISC-V Instruction Set Architecture (ISA). Cobham Gaisler is a Strategic Member of RISC-V International, which directs the future development and adoption of this ISA, enabling a new era of processor innovation.

“We have gained a very positive experience with Cobham Gaisler’s products to develop our software solutions for quality flight boards,” said Francisco Gómez, CEO, fentISS. “Via this collaboration, we will be able to achieve even greater results and establish an even better product-market fit for our solutions.”

The LEON5 from Cobham Gaisler is a synthesizable VHDL model of a 32-bit processor compliant with the SPARC V8 architecture and constitutes a highly configurable and suitable model for system-on-chip (SOC) designs. Cobham Gaisler’s NOEL-V, on the other hand, is a synthesizable VHDL model of a processor that implements the RISC-V architecture. NOEL-V can be implemented as a dual-issue processor, allowing up to two instructions per cycle to be executed in parallel. The LEON5 and NOEL-V are available in source code and bitstreams for FPGA platforms listed at www.cobhamaes.com/Gaisler.

fentISS’s XtratuM is a hypervisor specially designed for real-time embedded systems to be secure, reliable and efficient. The solution provides a framework to run several operating systems in a robust partitioned environment, making use of para-virtualization to achieve temporal and spatial isolation requirements of mixed-critical systems. This hypervisor from fentISS is especially suitable for safety-critical and security-critical applications in many different fields, the aerospace market being its main focus. XtratuM has recently been ported to support RISC-V ISA, an important step to consider on the roadmap for the company.

“Since Cobham Gaisler introduced radiation hardened multi-core processors with GR712RC into European space computers, we have been improving the support for Time and Space Partitioning and the handling of processor interference,” said Jan Andersson, Director of Engineering, Cobham Gaisler. “While already available in the quad-LEON4FT GR740, further improvements will be included in the architecture of LEON5 IP core and by utilizing the clean separation of modes of the RISC-V and its H extension soon available in NOEL-V. We’re looking forward collaborating closer with fentISS, taking advantage of XNG’s multi-architecture hypervisor support for both LEON and NOEL-V.”

Past space market collaborations include the XtratuM on LEON3FT, selected with GR712RC radiation-hardened dual-core processor from Cobham Gaisler on the missions MERLIN, SVOM, SWOT and JUICE, and XtratuM on LEON4FT, selected on the GR740 radiation-hardened quad-core processor for the PLATINO project, the future basis for the Italian Space Agency’s Earth Observation and Telecommunication constellations. XtratuM XNG has also been ported to the LEON3, LEON4 and the new LEON5 processors.

Common development projects are also a factor in this collaboration, more specifically the De-RISC European Commission project coordinated by fentISS in which Cobham Gaisler plays an important role in the hardware development. Through the De-RISC project, EIC-FTI 869945 – Dependable Real-time Infrastructure for Safety-critical Computer, the NOEL-V processor will form the basis for the hardware compute platform on which XNG will be used by other partners in the project.

Cobham Gaisler and fentISS are confident that this collaboration will boost product portfolios and allow each to align marketing actions to gain visibility across the space market.

About fent Innovative Software Solutions

fentISS is a technological company that offers software solutions specifically designed for critical real-time embedded partitioned systems using virtualization techniques. This Spanish company provides software solutions which prevent mutual interference between critical embedded applications when running in a common hardware platform. fentISS virtualization solutions will be orbiting in more than 100 satellites by end of 2020. https://fentiss.com/

About Cobham Advanced Electronic Solutions

Cobham Advanced Electronic Solutions is the largest provider of analog and radiation hardened technology for the United States aerospace and defense industry. With a broad portfolio of off-the-shelf and customized RF, microwave and high reliability microelectronic products and subsystems, CAES offers a complete range of solutions for the entire signal chain from aperture to digital conversion. www.cobhamaes.com