Protection and Relocation Extension for RISC-V

The current trend of transforming static embedded systems into open platforms (in which several software providers are able to directly load their software) drives the need to design and implement modular embedded software. Additionally, a myriad of embedded devices are expected to operate and
provide services for years, or even decades, while remaining correct and secure at all times. Therefore, one of the emerging challenges for highly adaptive embedded computing platforms is to offer dynamic software composition at runtime and internal device housekeeping, which in conjunction improve device maintainability. With our hardware/software co-designed concept, the software can be dynamically updated at module granularity for application and middleware layers, while maintaining dependencies through loose coupling. At the hardware layer, a RISC-V extension enables the loose coupling by implementing effective runtime relocation and protection. This allows modules to freely move in memory without invalidating references.