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They pay money just like any other customer of TSMC. SiFive has a lot of buzz in the industry. I wouldn't be surprised that TSMC wanted to work with them. Bu
by lizknope 6y ago
They pay money just like any other customer of TSMC. SiFive has a lot of buzz in the industry. I wouldn't be surprised that TSMC wanted to work with them.
But there are other intermediary companies that help startups group multiple chips from multiple companies together into a single mask. This is called a "shuttle" and allows the companies to split the costs of the masks (I've heard up to $30 million for 5nm)
SiFive is probably building about 2,000 of these chips for development boards. They aren't trying to order a hundred million like Nvidia.
- klelatti 6y agoThanks that's very interesting. No intention in any way to belittle SiFive - just puzzled as to how they managed to get onto this process when it's obviously so much in demand. Good for them!
- monocasa 6y agoAdding to this, it's in TSMC's interest to have cheaper licenses for high quality processor cores for it's customers, and therefore have strategic reasons to prioritize small runs of RISC-V chips right now. Pretty classic "commoditize your complement".
- gautamcgoel 6y agoCan you list some of these shuttle companies? What are the most popular/reputable ones?
- lizknope 6y agoWhen I have worked at large companies we handled everything ourselves and dealt directly with the fabs. When I worked at startups and smaller companies we have interacted with: Global Unichip Corporation (I believe TSMC owns part of the company) https://www.guc-asic.com/en-global https://www.guc-asic.com/en-global Open Silicon (they literally merged with SiFive to become OpenFive and made this chip in the article) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-Silicon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-Silicon Uniquify https://www.uniquify.com/ https://www.uniquify.com/ Socionext https://www.socionext.com/en/ https://www.socionext.com/en/ There are others but these are the 4 that I have dealt with.