Sectors such as car manufacturing, telecommunications, airports, railway traffic management and civil protection alert systems require increasing computing capabilities as they use more autonomous systems and more complex applications. The spin-off brings together a set of hardware technologies specifically designed to allow medium and high-performance processors to be used in critical applications for which 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 the failure and interrupts the process in a controlled manner rather than 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 the 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 were developed over more than 10 years at the BSC by researchers from the BSC and the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya - BarcelonaTech (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 the first stage, the spin-off will focus on chip design, leaving physical manufacturing for a future stage, under the RISC-V open-source architecture standard, which allows for progress toward European technological sovereignty by eliminating dependencies and licences from external multinationals. This approach guarantees full control over the hardware, an autonomy that is crucial for the critical sectors the company operates in, allowing it to offer high-performance solutions that are 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 the BSC and the UPC: making technology that serves society to solve real problems. By working with the RISC-V ecosystem, we confirm the commitment of these institutions to achieving a European technological sovereignty that is free from external dependencies," said Mateo Valero, the BSC’s director.

Safe and Secure Technologies S.L., newly incorporated and currently seeking investors, is the fifteenth spin-off promoted by the BSC, reflecting the BSC'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 14 previous spin-offs have employed more than 610 highly qualified professionals and raised more than 44 million euros in private investment, consolidating a deep-tech innovation ecosystem in the region. The UPC, for its part, has spent more than 25 years creating knowledge-based companies and has a portfolio of more than 40 investee companies.

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

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