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I'll start by saying that I am a chip designer for the last 25 years. A former company I worked at about 6 years ago talked to SiFive about a partnership. I'm
by lizknope 3y ago
I'll start by saying that I am a chip designer for the last 25 years.
A former company I worked at about 6 years ago talked to SiFive about a partnership. I'm not sure why the deal fell apart but I was never sure what SiFive's business model was. It seemed to be a lot of different things.
They had the cores that you could license but then they also made chips like an SoC similar to to the Broadcom chips on Raspberry Pi systems.
In August 2020, SiFive bought Open Silicon.
Open Silicon was a design services company started by former Intel people. We hear a lot about Intel wanted to be a foundry like TSMC for external customers. A lot of the design services is physical design (synthesis, place and route, integrating together third party IP like PCIE, DDR, fabrics, controller IP) Intel tries to be a foundry about every 10 years then stops. Either their internal volume gets too high to handle external customers or they don't get enough external customers.
SiFive then rebranded the Open Silicon team as OpenFive. I thought they were going to do design services for external customers integrating together their internal RISC-V cores.
In September 2022, SiFive sold the OpenFive group to Alphawave. I assume that the design services stuff didn't go well. Most of the companies I know that are using RISC-V are big companies that don't really go to a third party design services company. I'm going to guess that the VC's didn't like the cash burning and lack of revenue and sold OpenFive but now who knows what will happen.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-Silicon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-Silicon
https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/alphawave-acquires-sifives-openfive-business-for-210-million/ https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/alphawave-acquire...
- pstrateman 3y agoThe CEO of SiFive at the time of the Open Silicon purchase used to be the CEO of Open Silicon. Big doubt that deal was in the best interest of SiFive, maybe thats why he isnt CEO anymore.
- lizknope 3y agoThanks. I totally missed that. I knew people at Open Silicon around 2010-2014 and interviewed there but didn't join. This industry is so small you run into the same people again and again.
- OhMeadhbh 3y agoSiFive bought OpenSilicon (and Naveed moved over to SiFive) long before 2020. I'm not sure why the WikiPedia says that. The SiFive Wikipedia page says they were acquired in 2018, but I thought it was before that. I thought they had purchased OpenSilicon around the time Naveed was appointed SiFive's CEO (just before I started in 2017.) My take on the SiFive / OpenSilicon venture was they initially thought they (SiFive) initially thought they were going to make their money with the Core Designer and they wanted customers to be able to push a button and have designs move from the core designer (Rocket++) to verilog to OpenSilicon who would do all the bits you have to do to turn a verilog design into actual chips. But when the core designer strategy was de-emphasized, OpenSilicon was an expensive investment that didn't make a lot of revenue, so they needed to get rid of it if there was any hope to be acquired. I was just a peon and had no contact with the management team, so this is all just a guess on my part.
- lizknope 3y agoI interviewed at Open Silicon in 2010 and had a few friends that were there from 2010-2013. I'm in physical design and they had a big PD team but it sounded like a sweatshop where they just bend over and do whatever ridiculous crap the customer asks for. I actually had lunch with one of the co founders during my interview process. I got a bad vibe from the whole thing and said no thanks.