Can SiFive thrive? Chip designer needs a strong RISC-V ecosystem to succeed

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SiFive is making waves in the RISC-V chip space, but will need community support to challenge established designers.

techmonitor.ai, Apr. 05, 2022 – 

Chip designer SiFive swelled its coffers last month with a funding round worth $175m, taking the total invested in the company to more than $350m. SiFive has rapidly become the biggest and best-known company developing chips built on RISC-V, an open-source chip architecture long touted as a rival to x86 and Arm, and has now set its sights on developing high-performance processors based on RISC-V.

The Series-F round, led by Coatue Management, values the company at $2.5bn, and is validation not only for SiFive but for the RISC-V ecosystem as a whole, according to SiFive CEO Patrick Little. "The market has spoken and made it abundantly clear that RISC-V computing will be competing for the heart of all future computing platforms," Little said. "As the founder and market leader of RISC-V computing it's our role to lead this ecosystem forward and offer customers an advanced computing alternative to Arm and others."

It has been a busy few weeks for SiFive, which also disposed of OpenFive, its business unit working on chip connectivity, by selling it to Canadian company AlphaWave for $210m, leaving it free to focus on CPUs. With over $300m to play with, it is well-positioned to cement its position as the leading RISC-V chip developer, but faces increasing competition. Its success or failure could hinge on a strong relationship with the wider RISC-V community.

Emerging in 2010 from the Parallel Computing Lab at UC Berkeley in California, RISC-V is a modular instruction set architecture (ISA) which allows developers to build chips on top of a core, openly available, instruction set.

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