SiFive based in San Francisco, the fabless provider of customised, open-source-enabled semiconductors:
a. Co-founded in 2015 by Krste Asanovic, currently the company's chief architect, Yunsup Lee, currently CTO, and Andrew Waterman, currently chief engineer, the inventors of RISC-V technology.
b. Established with the aim of providing access to custom silicon chip designs leveraging RISC-V technology.
Announced that it has raised $8.5 million in a Series B round led by Spark Capital, with the participation of Osage University Partners and existing investor Sutter Hill Ventures. The latest funding brings the total investment in SiFive to $13.5 million and comes as the company reports increasing demand for RISC-V IP. In conjunction with the new funding, Todd Dagres, general partner at Spark Capital, is to join the SiFive board of directors.
SiFive is a fabless provider of custom semiconductors based on the free and open RISC-V instruction set architecture. Founded by the inventors of RISC-V, SiFive stated that in the first six months of availability, more than 1,000 HiFive1 software development boards have been purchased and delivered to developers in over 40 countries.SiFive launched its Freedom Everywhere platform, designed for micro-controller, embedded, IoT and wearable applications, and Freedom Unleashed platform for machine learning, storage and networking applications in July 2016. In November, it announced general availability of the Freedom Everywhere 310 (FE310) SoC and HiFive1 software development board.
The company noted that RISC-V has established an ecosystem of more than 60 companies that includes Google, HPE, Microsoft, IBM, Qualcomm, NVIDIA, Samsung and Microsemi, while member companies and third-party open-source contributors are helping build a suite of software and toolchains that includes GCC and binutils.
