Contracts for Innovation: DSbD Advancing CHERI RISC-V Devices - Innovation Funding Service

Organisations can apply for a share of up to £10 million, inclusive of VAT, to accelerate the development and implementation of commercial CHERI-enabled RISC-V embedded devices.

This is a Contracts for Innovation competition funded by the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology.

The aim of the competition is to fund activities in maturing and growing the availability of commercial off the shelf implementations of CHERI (Capability Hardware Enhanced RISC Instructions) enabled devices for use in embedded computing.

The competition is supporting economic growth and societal resilience through accelerating the adoption and diffusion of the secure by design CHERI technology. Particular focus is being placed in the context of CHERI-enabled devices and the associated tooling and software components. Aiming to overcome the private sector’s underinvestment in protections for memory safety and compartmentalisation in embedded computing by creating CHERI-enabled devices that will enable software developers to adopt and commercialise a diversity of secured by design products and services.

Your project must focus on accelerating the availability of commercial-off-the-shelf CHERI-enabled devices. The goal is to broaden the availability of such devices for use by industry and software developers.

Projects are required to progress or accelerate the availability of CHERI-enabled devices and must:

• be supported and validated by a specific use case with a proposed customer,
• produce outputs to support the broader use of CHERI-enabled devices by businesses and software development communities

Applications must describe a credible and practical route to market to commercialise the developed CHERI-enabled device.

There will be an online briefing event at Tuesday 20^th May at 3pm: register to attend
(Briefing slides will be available to download from supporting information after the event.)

This is a single phase two stage competition. The decision to proceed with stage 2 will depend on the successful delivery against contracted milestones by the end of stage 1 and budget availability for stage 2.

In applying to this competition you are entering into a competitive process. This competition has a funding budget of up to £3 million for stage 1 and up to £7 million for stage 2, so we may not be able to fund all the proposed projects.

It may be the case that your project scores highly and receives positive comments from the assessors but we are still unable to fund it due to the portfolio approach taken.

Any adoption and implementation of a solution from this competition would be subject to a separate, possibly competitive, procurement exercise. This competition does not cover the purchase of any solution.

This competition closes at 11am UK time on the deadline stated in this Innovate UK competition brief. We cannot guarantee other government or third-party sites will always show the correct competition information.

Funding type

Procurement

Project size

Projects can range in total eligible costs between £2 million and £5 million, inclusive of VAT. Stage 1 must include contract agreed milestones and associated deliverables of up to £1.5 million.

Accessibility and Inclusion

Innovate UK welcomes and encourages applications from people of all backgrounds and are committed to making our application process accessible to everyone. This includes making reasonable adjustments, for people who have a disability or a long-term condition and face barriers applying to us.

You can contact Innovate UK at any time to ask for guidance.

We recommend you contact Innovate UK at least 15 working days before this competition’s closing date to allow us to put the most suitable support in place. The support we can provide may be limited if you contact us close to the competition deadline.

You can contact Innovate UK by email or call 0300 321 4357. Our phone lines are open from 9am to 12pm and 2pm to 5pm UK time, Monday to Friday (excluding bank holidays)