4 reasons to use RISC-V for aerospace and defense applications

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electronics360.globalspec.com, Apr. 29, 2019 – 

As aerospace and defense firms look toward developing future air and space platforms, they are making decisions about which hardware and software elements to use in their designs.

One significant design choice is the underlying instruction set architecture (ISA) that defines the interface between the software and hardware for a computer processor.

Among the options for ISAs are familiar commercial architectures like Intel's x86 ISA that dominates the desktop and server markets and the ARM architecture common in mobile devices like smartphones.

But these ISAs are the proprietary intellectual property (IP) of their owners. Any developers designing new processors based on these commercial ISAs may pay steep fees to the owners.

A relatively new ISA called RISC-V has emerged as an open source alternative to commercial ISAs.

RISC-V is an extensible, widely available, modern ISA designed to support efficient, high-performance computing. Although RISC-V is new, it is experiencing rapid adoption thanks to its open license, efficient design and burgeoning development resources like emulators, debuggers and operating system support. RISC-V may represent a viable option for chip designs in many industries, but may be particularly well suited for aerospace and defense applications for at least four reasons.

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