The article mentions that is is from the OpenFive division of SiFive. OpenFive used to be Open Silicon and their business model was working with other companie

The article mentions that is is from the OpenFive division of SiFive. OpenFive used to be Open Silicon and their business model was working with other companies to take their Verilog RTL and do all of the physical design (synthesis to logic gates, place and route of the standard cells, timing analysis, test vector generation) and then work with the foundries to deliver all of the data for manufacturing. Since Open Silicon is now OpenFive and part of SiFive they literally have all this experience in house and don't need to depend on another company between them and TSMC. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-Silicon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-Silicon