ISOLDE

In the course of the European Chips Act, the European Commission has launched initiatives to advance Europe's digital sovereignty. One of the initiatives is creating and expanding a RISC-V open-source ecosystem within Europe. The project ISOLDE aims to

• significantly support the digital transformation of all economic and societal sectors,
• speed up the transition towards a green, climate neutral and digital Europe,
• strengthen the design capacity and
• achieving digital autonomy EU wide.

SAL's primary research focus in this project is to develop innovative concepts for hardware-based accelerators in post-quantum cryptography and event-based convolutional operations. For the arithmetic heavy operation profile of cryptographic algorithms emphasis is placed on exploration of identifying promising separation in between heterogenous hardware units and their accompanying software mates.

At the end of the project, the project consortium aims to have high-performance RISC-V processing systems and platforms with at least TRL 7. They will be demonstrated for important European application areas such as automotive, space and IoT. To achieve this ambitious goal, industry-standard open-source support for development, verification and maintenance will be provided. The customizable IPs will be hosted on European servers to meet the requirement of European digital sovereignty. In this way, ISOLDE will make an important contribution to unifying and focusing the ecosystem for the open-source RISC-V architecture, in particular in the area of high-performance computing, thus creating a breakthrough design capability across the EU microelectronics industry.