SiFive is pioneering a new model in the semiconductor business and to do so has raised $8.5 million in a second round of funding, led by Spark Capital.
San Francisco-based SiFive is on a mission to democratize access to custom silicon chip designs. The company’s founders invented RISC-V, a free and open instruction set architecture for modern microprocessors. It consists of all of the software instructions needed to program a microprocessor based on the RISC-V architecture. And SiFive is taking that architecture and making it easy to design the custom variants that companies need.
So far, the RISC-V foundation has 60 member companies, including Google, HP Enterprise, Microsoft, IBM, Qualcomm, NVIDIA, Samsung, Microsemi, and others. SiFive has developed its Coreplex IP (intellectual property) that others can license as they design their own processors and computing systems based on RISC-V.
Osage University Partners and existing investor Sutter Hill Ventures also participated in the funding round. The new funds bring the total investment in SiFive to $13.5 million.
SiFive founders Krste Asanovic, Yunsup Lee, and Andrew Waterman created RISC-V as a new instruction set architecture (ISA), just as Intel and ARM have their own ISA. But rather than having just one company own the ISA, the RISC-V creators made their ISA open and free to use. They monetize it through customization and support, much like Linux companies do with their open source operating systems.
Image Credit: SiFive
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