Space Industry Is Standardizing on RISC-V

By Pablo Valerio, EE Times | June 16, 2026

BOLOGNA, Italy — At the RISC-V Summit Europe 2026, semiconductor designers, software developers, and aerospace engineers gathered to discuss the changing landscape of computing in space.

During the “RISC-V in Space” session on June 10, experts from the European Space Agency, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Microchip, and Frontgrade Gaisler explained how quickly the open-standard instruction set is being adopted for space missions.

History of space semiconductors

Space exploration and computing have always been closely linked. Gianluca Furano from the European Space Agency said that today’s embedded systems actually started in space, shaped by the tough demands of early missions such as Voyager. Since space is so harsh, engineers have always looked for reliable, open-standard designs that they can check and adapt.

About thirty years ago, the European Space Agency chose SPARC (Scalable Processor ARChitecture) as its main instruction set because it was open and had well-developed tools.

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