Deadline: 18-Jun-25
The Contracts for Innovation competition funded by the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology which aims 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.
Scope
- 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
Research Categories
- Prototype development and evaluation
- This can include prototyping, demonstrating, piloting, testing and validation of new or improved products, processes or services in environments representative of real-life operating conditions.
- The primary objective is to make further technical improvements on products, processes or services that are not substantially set.
Funding Information
- A total of up to £10 million, inclusive of VAT, is allocated to this competition, across two stages. The funding budget is up to £3 million for stage 1 and up £7 million for stage 2.
- Contracts will be awarded to projects with total eligible costs of up to £1.5 million, inclusive of VAT, in stage 1 and between £500,000 and £3.5 million, inclusive of VAT, in stage 2. Each project between 6 and 31 months.
Duration
- Projects must: start by 1 September 2025 and end by 31 March 2028
- Projects must last between 6 and 31 months.
Eligibility Criteria
- Projects must always start on the first of the month, even if this is a non-working day. You must not start your project until your Contract has been approved by Innovate UK.
- Applicant
- To lead a project, you can:
- be an organisation of any size
- work alone or with the subcontracted skills and expertise of others from business, research organisations, research and technology organisations, or the third sector (charities, social enterprises and voluntary groups)
- To lead a project, you can:
- Applicant organisations must:
- have an existing microcontroller or microprocessor system-on-chip device that they want to modify to be a CHERI-enabled device, or
- be currently developing, or have developed, a CHERI-enabled device and want to broaden its market applicability or accelerate its availability
Ineligibility Criteria
- They will not fund projects that:
- are not original in scope and duplicate someone else’s work
- do not use a RISC-V processor that supports the CHERI architecture extensions
- do not develop a CHERI-enabled device towards commercial off the shelf availability
- outputs do not support the broader use of CHERI-enabled devices by businesses and software development communities
- do not have a proposed customer use case
For more information, visit Gov.UK.
