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The partnership in emerging technologies Designing RISC-V-based Accelerators for next generation Computers (DRAC) will design, verify, implement and fabricate a high performance general purpose processor that will incorporate different accelerators based on the RISC-V technology, with specific applications in the field of security, genomics and autonomous navigation. RISC-V is an open instruction set architecture defined by the RISC-V Foundation. This foundation has attracted more than 100 international institutions including universities, research centers and companies worldwide. RISC-V is modular and extensible, and multiple accelerators can be incorporated to the design.

DRAC will develop an out-of-order general purpose RISC-V processor that will outperform current and future in-order processor designs. Moreover, DRAC will design the hardware support required to accelerate three emerging application domains: security, precision medicine and autonomous navigation.

• Designing a secure processor is challenging, especially if we consider the future arrival of quantum computers that will make vulnerable the cryptographic schemes implemented in current processors. Precision medicine workloads will become prevalent in the future.
• Population-level precision medicine analysis requires a huge compute power. Being able to perform these computations faster and more efficiently will allow precision medicine to become a reality in a near future.
• Finally, with the arrival of autonomous cars, cars will be equipped with more powerful processors. Reducing the power and cost of these processors is fundamental for autonomous cars to reach the market in the near future.