SiFive Celebrates Historic 100 Design Win Milestone

Compelling Portfolio and Strategic Partnerships Propel RISC-V Leader into Hypergrowth

SAN MATEO, Calif. - June 6, 2019 - SiFive, Inc., the leading provider of commercial RISC-V processor IP and silicon solutions, announced today that it has secured its 101st design win. SiFive has gained significant traction in embedded markets as device manufacturers rapidly adopt domain-specific application processor designs to enable powerful, secure, efficient computing in Edge devices. As a trillion smart, connected devices are forecasted to come online by 2025, SiFive's proven capabilities for high-performance embedded solutions are crucial for success in this new era of Edge IoT. The scalable capabilities of RISC-V and SiFive's excellence in innovation, design and engineering have enabled leading semiconductor companies to move through the selection, customization and enhancement phases of design in just two months.

RISC-V Ecosystem

The growth experienced by SiFive, a founding platinum member of the RISC-V Foundation, is driven by the mainstream adoption of RISC-V, a free, open and mature ISA that is suitable for all levels of compute from microcontrollers to hyperscale computing. The RISC-V Foundation has grown to 235 members, including Alibaba, Cadence Design Systems, Google, Microchip, Micron, NVIDIA, Tesla, TSMC, Samsung and Western Digital. The RISC-V Foundation is chartered to standardize and promote RISC-V together with its hardware and software ecosystem.

SiFive is uniquely positioned to take advantage of the need for custom silicon designs, as traditional business models with legacy architectures force customers to have an architecture prescribed to them after selecting a vendor. RISC-V allows customers to select a core closely matched to their needs and then proceed to select a vendor based on differentiating expertise and capabilities. This is where SiFive's expertise, RISC-V Core IP portfolio with in-house SoC and PHY IPs, industry partnerships and unique DesignShare IP portfolio provide the perfect mix of purpose-driven design and proven technology.

SiFive Core IP Product Portfolio

SiFive's RISC-V Core IP portfolio of 7, 5, 3 and 2-series cores scale RISC-V designs at every performance level, from the 8-stage, dual-issue superscalar pipeline processor cores down to power and area optimized 2-stage, single-issue pipeline cores. 32-bit embedded cores for microcontrollers, Edge computing and IoT devices are complemented by 64-bit embedded cores for storage, augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR) and machine learning. The performance oriented 7- and 5-series cores also available in 64-bit application processor variants for use in datacenters, network baseband or similar Linux-based applications.

The SiFive 2 series has seen the fastest uptake of feature upgrades by customers, as they take advantage of the regularly scheduled enhancements to Core IP, features and tools. Critically, the 64-bit S2 enables SoCs to have an always-on, low-power CPU that can be combined with high-performance CPUs that switch on only when applications demand performance, such as in voice-activated smart devices.

SiFive delivers its configurable Core IP via its industry-first online core configurator, SiFive Core Designer. By adopting a native cloud licensing model for Core IP evaluation, customization and RTL delivery, customers gain several advantages. Unlike legacy architectures, which depreciate over time and are replaced on developmental roadmaps, SiFive's Core IP is continually maintained and improved. The 7 series core has increased performance from 4.9 to 5.1 in the important industry benchmark CoreMark®, due to ongoing performance optimizations since its launch.

SiFive Product Templates

SiFive launched the industry's first SoC Templates, Freedom Aware, in partnership with QuickLogic. These templates are optimized for ultra-low power solutions in consumer and industrial IoT applications. By taking advantage of SiFive Freedom Aware SoC Templates, silicon designers can reduce the design cycle to just a few months, decrease the total cost to first silicon by an order of magnitude and, most importantly, provide custom silicon solutions while removing the dependency on large semiconductor design teams.

"Through our strategic partnership, we are working very closely with SiFive to combine the success of its RISC-V Core IP and demonstrated quick-turn design capabilities with QuickLogic's signature ultra-low-power SoC design expertise, AI subsystems and end-to-end AI development tools to introduce the world's first SoC Templates," said Brian Faith, president and CEO of QuickLogic. "The Freedom Aware SoC Template family will enable OEMs to address the rapidly emerging markets for consumer and industrial end-point applications with unique and high-value solutions. Our shared vision to democratize SoC design by significantly lowering the cost and development time has been validated by the response to the April 2019 introduction of the Freedom Aware SoC Template family and interest in our Early Adopter program."

SiFive Custom SoC Business Unit

SiFive's Custom SoC (CSOC) division creates fully custom SoCs from specification to final production silicon, leveraging SiFive's core IP portfolio with in house SoC and PHY IPs, DesignShare IP, customer IP and SiFive's prestigious industry partnerships. CSOC can further offer full custom SoCs with a silicon track record of over 300 tape-outs, nearly 150 million SoC units shipped with an average 25 DPPM and ISO 9001:2015 certification.

"The paradigm has shifted," said Naveed Sherwani, president and CEO of SiFive. "One-hundred-and-one design wins represents the fact that our hallmark power-efficient cores have been rapidly adopted by manufacturers in embedded markets, putting RISC-V cores firmly on the map and the RISC-V revolution well and truly established. SiFive customers value innovation and execution at speed, and, currently, SiFive remains the only company to offer commercial 64-bit embedded RISC-V cores. SiFive offers market-leading features such as heterogeneous coherent clusters where our E, S and U cores ranging from 7- to 2-series can be combined coherently in the same cluster. With these comprehensive offerings, the choice to partner with SiFive is clear."

About SiFive

SiFive is the leading provider of market-ready processor core IP, development tools and silicon solutions based on the free and open RISC-V instruction set architecture. Led by a team of seasoned silicon executives and the RISC-V inventors, SiFive helps SoC designers reduce time-to-market and realize cost savings with customized, open-architecture processor cores, and democratizes access to optimized silicon by enabling system designers in all market verticals to build customized RISC-V based semiconductors. With 14 offices worldwide, SiFive has backing from Sutter Hill Ventures, Spark Capital, Osage University Partners, Chengwei, Huami, SK Hynix, Intel Capital, and Western Digital. For more information, www.sifive.com.