Welcome - The SiFive Download, Part IV

A new season, new partnerships and a new frontier.

These last few months have been equal parts busy, exciting, and promising. We are eager to catch you up on the latest happenings at SiFive and within the RISC-V ecosystem as a whole.

We had a blast this week at the 7th RISC-V Workshop, which drew more than 500 attendees! In addition to seeing some awesome swag, we heard great news from presenting companies and partners, such as workshop host Western Digital, who announced its intention to shift the 1 billion cores it ships annually in its products to RISC-V. We were also excited to be named by several presenting companies, including Lauterbach and the University of Washington, as a leading partner in the emerging RISC-V ecosystem. At the evening poster session reception, our demo table had great traffic with plenty of visitors from potential customers and partners.

We also had the honor of partnering with some of the industry’s leading companies and announced the following at the workshop:

An extended partnership with Microsemi: Microsemi and SiFive formed a strategic partnership to create and market a development board based on SiFive’s RISC-V based Freedom Unleashed 500 (U500) platform and Microsemi’s PolarFire FPGAs.
Membership in GLOBALFOUNDRIES’ FDXcelerator Partner Program: SiFive has joined the GF program that brings together select partners to integrate their products or services into validated, plug-and-play design solutions. This provides GF customers access to SiFive RISC-V Core IP alongside a broad set of quality offerings specific to GF’s 22FDX technology

And as you likely guessed, we had a lot to talk about! Did you miss it? No worries, the video links to our presentations will soon be up on riscv.org.

Introducing DesignShare, our revolutionary ecosystem created to spur innovation

Earlier this summer, we launched a movement to further accelerate our mission to democratize access to custom silicon: DesignShare. DesignShare is a new concept in which partnering companies make IP and components available to emerging markets and companies at a reduced upfront cost to help spur innovation in the industry.

Similar to how the foundry model created an entirely new class of fabless semiconductor company (which no longer had to build and support its own foundry), DesignShare reduces the barriers that traditionally block all but the largest industry players from access to custom silicon and world class IP and creates an entirely new group of companies that can innovate at the hardware and software level.

In just a few short months, the DesignShare initiative has granted system designers access to a wide range of technology. Companies including Rambus, Flex Logix, UltraSoC, Analog Bits and eMemory have all enlisted to make it easier and more flexible for designers to employ SiFive-based RISC-V cores in future designs. In addition to PLLs and SERDES IP, system designers can include cryptographic cores, embedded analytics, debug and trace technology, embedded, reconfigurable FPGA and logic-based, non-volatile memory to their SoCs.

Are you interested in being a part of the evolution? Let’s talk!

Ready for our next webinar?
Date: Jan.17, 2018, at 10:30 a.m. PST.

Part three of our “Introduction to SiFive RISC-V Core IP” webinar will demonstrate how to use the evaluation versions of our E31 and E51 RISC-V Core IP. In this webinar, we will download and program an Arty FPGA board with one of the evaluation images, and use Freedom Studio to program load and debug a program.

Missed our last webinar? No worries! You can find both session recordings here and download the materials presented.

Forum Highlight

The SiFive Forums are buzzing this month! It’s packed with valuable content that can answer your questions and curiosity surrounding RISC-V, development boards, IP evaluations and much more. Here’s a peek at some of the threads that caught our attention (and will now have yours, too!):

Featured Project Of the Month

Our view of the world centers around the developer, the engineer, the user, the dreamer. It’s you who are contributing to RISC-V and open-source, which makes what we do at SiFive possible.

This month’s featured project comes from Antmicro, which contributed the design of a RISC-V electronic badge for the 7th RISC-V Workshop. Speakers and journalists were sporting these limited edition badges developed in collaboration with SiFive and co-sponsored by the Foundation. Programmable from their smartphones, badge-wearers (can we call them badgers??) were able to display their name and whatever message of their choice from the e-ink screen. Best of all, the badge is completely open sourced and all the design files and software are available. It’s consisted of a carrier card with a reusable, socket-based small RISC-V SoC module that can be removed and used for prototyping other interesting RISC-V projects.

We’d love to feature your SiFive project in the next newsletter - let us know what you are working on!

More Blog Posts

What’s been on our minds, you ask? Quite a few things, but here are some of our top blogs over the past month:

Awards Season Brings Big Surprises by Jack Kang

Analog Bits Clocks into the DesignShare Ecosystem by Jack Kang

The DesignShare Ecosystem Expands Its Catalog of IP to include eMemory’s Logic NVM by Jack Kang

All Aboard, Part 7: Entering and Exiting the Linux Kernel on RISC-V by Palmer Dabbelt

A Core By Any Other Name… by Jack Kang

SiFive in the Press

Want to see who has been talking about SiFive recently? Let’s take a look!

SiFive Building RISC-V Ecosystem, One Partnership at a Time by Majeed Ahmad, AllAboutCircuits.com

SiFive Adds Flex Logix eFPGA IPs to DesignShare Initiative by Chantelle Dubois, AllAboutCircuits.com

DesignShare is all About Enabling Design Wins! by Daniel Nenni, SemiWiki

FlexLogix joins SiFive’s DesignShare program by Charlie Demerjian, SemiAccurate

Flex Logix makes eFPGA available for SiFive design environment by David Manners, ElectronicsWeekly.com

The Week In Review: Design by Jesse Allen, SemiEngineering

RISC-V in the News

We’re always keeping an eye on RISC-V; after all, our founders invented it! Speaking of, did you hear the RISC-V ecosystem surpassed 100 members globally? We’re excited to see the growth! Check out the news here, and more of the latest conversations around the RISC-V ISA:

UltraSoC selected by Microsemi for growing RISC-V product rangen Source Software Based Big Data Analytics Technology to Increase Speed by Up to 100 Times by Staff, EE Journal

Andes partners with EDA tool vendors for more RISC-V SoC support, by Julien Happich, EE News Europe

Microsemi Opens RISC-V Ecosystem with Industry Leaders by Staff, Photonics.com

Thanks so much for all of your continued support!

Till next time,

Jack Kang

We would love to hear from you - reply to this email with any questions or inquiries and we will get right back to you!