Safe and Secure Technologies, the new BSC and UPC spin-off that will design chips for critical sectors where “failure is not an option”

The company specializes in developing chips for sectors such as automotive, airport management, or emergency services, where a system failure can have major human and economic consequences

• The project's technology is part of the RISC-V open-source ecosystem, thereby contributing to progress toward European technological sovereignty.
• The creation of Safe and Secure Technologies S.L. culminates over 10 years of research work in collaboration with UPC, making the company the fifteenth spin-off created at BSC.

March 27, 2026 -- The Barcelona Supercomputing Center – Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (BSC-CNS) and the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya - BarcelonaTech (UPC) promote the creation of their new spin-off Safe and Secure Technologies S.L., which is born with the purpose of designing chips for critical sectors in infrastructure and emergency services, where a system failure could have significant consequences, both at a human and economic level.

Sectors such as automotive, telecommunications, airports, railway traffic management, or civil protection alert systems, among others, require increasing computing capabilities as they use more autonomous systems and more complex applications. Now, this spin-off 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 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 project's flagship technology is the so-called Safety Island, which provides the reliability and monitoring and control capacity necessary to enable the use of high-performance hardware in critical applications. it combines technologies that spent more than 10 years in development at BSC jointly by researchers from BSC and UPC, within the context of Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe projects such as De-RISC, SELENE, ISOLDE, and FRACTAL.

Strategic autonomy: European chips without dependencies

In a first phase, the spin-off will focus on chip design, leaving physical manufacturing for a future stage. All this is under the RISC-V open-source architecture standard, which allows for progress toward European technological sovereignty by eliminating dependencies and licenses from external multinationals. This approach guarantees full control over the hardware—an autonomy that is crucial for the critical sectors where the company operates, allowing it to offer high-performance solutions free from the technical and legal restrictions of traditional closed technologies.

“The creation of Safe and Secure Technologies S.L. is an example of one of the main drivers of BSC and UPC: making technology that serves society to solve real problems. Furthermore, by working with the RISC-V ecosystem, we confirm the commitment of both institutions to achieve a European technological sovereignty free from external dependencies," said Mateo Valero, BSC’s director.

Safe and Secure Technologies S.L., which is already incorporated and seeking investors, thus becomes the fifteenth spin-off promoted by BSC, reflecting the center's firm commitment to transforming scientific results into real impact for society. Since the creation of the first spin-off, Nostrum Biodiscovery, 10 years ago, the fourteen previous spin-offs employed more than 610 highly qualified professionals and managed to raise more than 44 million euros in private investment, consolidating a deep-tech innovation ecosystem in the region. UPC, for its part, spent more than 25 years creating knowledge-based companies and has a portfolio of more than forty investee companies.

Furthermore, the launch of Safe and Secure Technologies S.L. highlights the sustained collaboration between BSC and UPC and their commitment to technology transfer, which already promoted the creation of five spin-offs jointly.

In 2020, Abella himself along with Francisco J. Cazorla, co-director of the HPES laboratory at BSC and co-founder of Safe and Secure Technologies S.L., founded another spin-off, Maspatechnologies SL, which became in 2022 the first company emerging from BSC to be sold, after being acquired by Danlaw Inc., a leading global provider of electronic solutions for the automotive and aerospace sectors.

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