I'm in the aerospace industry and I know my company and others would be very much interested in this. As I'm sure you're aware aerospace requirements are primarily on the environmental envolope of the chip (temperature, vibration, mechanical shock, EMI, etc) - to that end, I know it's tangential to consumer electronics, but is it in the cards to do any sort of radiation testing on the first run? Similarly, do you have a notion yet what sort of EMC standards you'll want to comply to? (if any).
The short answer to this is that no, we're not at the stage where we've carefully considered these parameters. Most of our focus so far has been on the platform design+implementation and on ensuring there is at least one viable route to a tapeout, with necessary packaging design and access to the physical IP we need given the funding we have.
We'll do whatever EMC testing is necessary to comply with legislation for sale in the UK/Europe/USA/elsewhere. Beyond that, it would depend on demand from potential adopters and understanding their use case. e.g. there's no point in spending lots of money on tests on the bare board if it turned people like yourself would be putting it in a case.
I'd be really interested in finding out more about your requirements and potential use cases. To an extent, our main focus is on getting something out of the door. However we're very aware that there are a number of applications, like aerospace, where the open source (and hence auditable) nature may be particularly interesting, where we may be able to make collaborate and make small modifications at the design stage to better support a target application, and where typical unit costs are much higher than e.g. mass-market mobile phone SoCs.
I'd love to take you up on your offer of advice on this. You don't have contact info in your profile, so please drop me a line at asb@lowrisc.org.
I should preface this that I work in the astronautics industry, and I'm only loosely familiar with aeronautics.
For spacecraft we are typically building avionics in very low volume - most of the time we're making 5-10 boards, or 10-100 if for whatever reason it's some sort of constellation - I haven't personally worked on a constellation, so they might be buying more for spares or further qualification testing, but the overall point being it's not in the 1000's (or higher). So that in and of itself limits electronics designs to (board) components that are "off-the-shelf".
Typically spacecraft are doing something "non-standard" in the electronics: it's the premise of many space missions, to do something worth doing in space. Most of the time the electronics development done on the spacecraft side (where I've had most of my experience) is to support some instrument or some "payload" that's one of a kind - lots of times those one of a kind instruments have supporting electronics. And lots of times those electronics can be communicated with via standard electrical interface types (for example: EIA485/RS485, LVDS, LVCMOS). However, very rarely is the data protocol, or the temporal functionality standardized. Couple this with significant performance requirements to support the operation of said instruments/payloads (amount of data that they produce, relative timing of several spacecraft components to autonomously control spacecraft attitude, etc..) and a single chip that can both support software for higher level directives (a processor) and programmable logic for lower level and non-standard electronics interfacing (an fpga) seems like a very logical choice.
So long story short: lots of times spacecraft require non-standard data protocols and timing, and due to the typical production volumes and time horizons, doing this development with an fpga/processor combination is very advantageous.
I'd love to help with this!