The CHERI Adoption Global Ecosystem Assessment Q1 2026 provides a snapshot of where the global CHERI ecosystem stands today, how adoption is progressing, and what is still needed to turn early promise into widespread deployment.
CHERI is a cybersecurity technology that builds memory safety directly into hardware. Instead of treating memory corruption as something to detect after the fact, CHERI changes the foundations of computing so that whole classes of vulnerabilities can be prevented by design.
The report finds that CHERI adoption is growing, but remains concentrated in evaluation, prototype, and early pilot stages. Software maturity is advancing quickly, with strong progress across operating systems, toolchains, SDKs, RTOS environments, and developer workflows. Hardware maturity is progressing more slowly, with most organisations still depending on FPGA platforms, soft cores, prototype silicon, development boards, or early microcontroller designs.
The United Kingdom remains the strongest region globally for CHERI activity. This position reflects sustained government support, academic leadership, processor IP development, demonstrator programmes, and growing ecosystem coordination through organisations such as the CHERI Alliance, The Capable Hub, and the CHERI Research Centre.
The report also highlights growing international activity across Europe and North America, with important contributions from organisations including Codasip, Ericsson, Microsoft, Google, Apple, SRI International, lowRISC, SCI Semiconductor, and several research institutions.
Several sectors stand out as strong near term opportunities for CHERI adoption. Embedded systems, telecoms, critical infrastructure, defence, and research all combine long support lifecycles, memory unsafe legacy code, resilience requirements, and increasing pressure to adopt secure by design approaches.
At the same time, several barriers remain. The most significant are limited production silicon, fragmented toolchains, skills shortages, certification gaps, incomplete standardisation, and limited commercial demand. These challenges are not unusual for an emerging hardware security ecosystem, but they do show where targeted action could make the greatest difference.
The assessment concludes that government, industry, academia, and open communities all have a role to play in the next phase of CHERI adoption. Procurement signals, demonstrator programmes, silicon support, shared tooling, standards participation, and developer training could all help accelerate progress.
This report is intended as a repeatable benchmark. By tracking CHERI adoption over time, the ecosystem can better understand where momentum is building, where blockers remain, and where intervention can help move CHERI from promising technology to practical deployment.
Read the full CHERI Adoption Global Ecosystem Assessment Q1 2026 to explore the findings in detail.