Intel Capital Investment Boosts Vision for the Future

We’re very happy to announce that Intel Capital participated in our recent Series C funding round. The investment was revealed at the Intel Capital Global Summit earlier today.

Now, you may be thinking, “$50.6 million provides immense potential for SiFive – so now what?” For those of you who aren’t familiar with what SiFive is all about, we aim to leverage the body of software and tools available from the open-source community under the guidance of the RISC-V Foundation with the intention of dramatically reducing the costs of developing custom silicon.

On the core side, SiFive has a comprehensive roadmap of RISC-V CPU IP. We provide our customers with a comprehensive roadmap of silicon-proven CPU IP cores spanning the range from microcontrollers, to high-performance embedded cores, all the way to multi-core Linux capable applications. The difference SiFive makes lies in how comprehensive our solutions are, leadership in silicon proof points, and full customization capabilities—from custom instructions to tweaking the microarchitecture. With this funding, we aim to continue investing in our world-class roadmap and leverage our silicon capabilities to continue to lead the ecosystem development.

For system companies looking to build chips, the major barrier has been cost. The average cost of prototyping a 28-nanometer chip is around $7 million. We aim to cut costs by 90 percent, charging less than a million dollars for companies to get custom ASIC chips.

Our goal is to get silicon in the hands of designers as quickly as possible. Let them take a test drive to run benchmarks and discover where the chip works well for an intended purpose, and then form a plan for when and how to move it into full-scale production. We strive for this process to support all types of companies, including startups who otherwise would have to design products around off-the-shelf silicon.

With our recent funding, growing team and ongoing support from our existing investors Sutter Hill Ventures, Spark Capital and Osage University Partners, as well as new investors Chengwei Capital, Huami, SK Telecom, Western Digital and Intel Capital, we aim to make this all possible and continue spearheading the RISC-V revolution.

Interested in being part of the revolution? We’d love to chat!