HiPEAC

BSC and UPC announce new spinoff, Safe and Secure Technologies

Barcelona Supercomputing Center – Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (BSC-CNS) and the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya - BarcelonaTech (UPC) have announced a new spinoff company, Safe and Secure Technologies. The company brings together a set of hardware technologies specifically designed to allow medium and high-performance processors to be used in critical applications where design and validation processes are particularly demanding and often regulated by standards that guarantee functional safety and cybersecurity.

‘The hardware we developed can only fail under very exceptional conditions, and when it does, it detects it and interrupts the process in a controlled manner before giving erroneous instructions. In an air-traffic control system, for example, this can be crucial to saving lives,’ explained HiPEAC member Jaume Abella, co-founder of Safe and Secure Technologies S.L. and co-director of the High Performance Embedded Systems (HPES) laboratory at BSC.

The company’s flagship technology, Safety Island, combines technologies developed over more than 10 years by researchers from BSC and UPC, within the context of EU-funded projects such as De-RISC, SELENE, ISOLDE, and FRACTAL. By focusing on chip design under the RISC-V open-source architecture standard, Safe and Secure Technologies support progress toward European technological sovereignty by eliminating dependencies and licenses from external multinationals, which is crucial for the critical sectors where the company operates.

photo of circuit board with BSC logo


Summary

BSC and UPC unveil the spinoff Safe and Secure Technologies, focusing on hardware for critical applications. Their flagship, Safety Island, aims to enhance functional safety and cybersecurity through RISC-V design.