SiFive Inc, a California startup working to commercialize an open-source semiconductor expertise, stated on Tuesday that it has raised an extra $60 million in funding from buyers together with SK Hynix and Saudi Aramco.
The corporate stated its current buyers – together with enterprise capital arms from Intel Corp, Qualcomm Inc and Western Digital Corp – additionally joined the funding spherical, bringing its whole capital raised since its founding in 2015 to greater than $185 million.
SiFive is working to promote designs for semiconductors primarily based on the RISC-V structure, an open-source recipe for making computing chips. The fundamental structure is free to make use of, however SiFive places it into designs that may extra readily be manufactured by a semiconductor manufacturing unit and provides in a few of its personal applied sciences to create a extra helpful processor chip than utilizing the free structure alone.The RISC-V ecosystem goals to problem SoftBank Group Corp’s Arm Ltd, which licenses out its proprietary chip structure to corporations resembling Samsung Electronics Co Ltd and Apple Inc, in addition to a number of of SiFive’s buyers.
A number of media retailers have reported that SoftBank is in talks with U.S. chip provider Nvidia Corp for a possible sale of Arm.
SiFive is a business entity that’s separate from the inspiration that oversees the open-source RISC-V expertise, though a number of of SiFive’s founders are co-creators of the expertise and are additionally concerned with the inspiration.
The muse final 12 months stated it was transferring its headquarters to Switzerland after a number of of the group’s international members raised issues about potential U.S. commerce curbs.
