RISC-V Global Forum 2020

This paper presents preliminary position of the ESA on the use of the RISC-V ISA for onboard electronics in space. The modular nature of this ISA, the availability of a rich software ecosystem, a rapidly growing community and a pool of open-source IP cores will allow space industry to spin-in developments from terrestrial fields (in terms of security, artificial intelligence, support for operating systems, hardware acceleration etc.) while focusing its efforts mainly on aspects related to the specific needs of on-board electronics for space applications. The use of an open, non proprietary ISA, will allow ad-hoc design of microarchitecture-level soft error countermeasures that can greatly increase the robustness of ASIC and FPGA implementations.