SiFive Brand Guidelines: Berkeley’s RISC-V Founders, HiFive Boards & Licensed Cores

An open instruction set, then a company to sell it.

SiFive grew out of a university project. The company says RISC-V, the open instruction set architecture at the centre of its business, began as a summer project at the University of California, Berkeley in 2010, created by its founders Krste Asanović, Andrew Waterman and Yunsup Lee working with David Patterson, the co-author of a standard textbook on computer architecture. An instruction set is the vocabulary of commands a processor understands; RISC-V is published as an open standard, so anyone may design a chip that speaks it.

The three researchers founded SiFive in 2015; English Wikipedia, citing a Bloomberg company profile, gives the month as September 2015. The company’s own timeline puts the founding of the standards body now called RISC-V International in the same year, and says that organisation is now headquartered in Switzerland. SiFive did not own the architecture it was built on; its plan was to sell finished, tested processor designs based on it.

The first products arrived quickly. On 29 November 2016, English Wikipedia says, SiFive released the Freedom Everywhere 310 system-on-chip and the HiFive development board, making it the first company to produce a chip implementing RISC-V, although some universities had already built RISC-V processors. The company’s own timeline describes 2016 as the year of the first commercial RISC-V system-on-chip and the first RISC-V board, the HiFive1.

Leadership changed as the company grew. Naveed Sherwani was appointed chief executive in August 2017, and Patrick Little in September 2020, English Wikipedia reports. SiFive’s website now lists Little as chairman, president and chief executive, with the three co-founders as chief architect, chief technology officer and chief engineer.

Cores for licence, boards for developers.

SiFive is a fabless company: it designs processors and licenses the designs, while chips are manufactured by others. English Wikipedia describes a licensing and royalty business model, competing mainly with proprietary architectures such as Arm. In October 2017 the company made a limited release of the U54-MC, reported at the time as the first 64-bit, quad-core RISC-V processor able to run full operating systems such as Linux, and in April 2021 it taped out a system-on-chip on TSMC’s N5 process, which English Wikipedia describes as the first RISC-V device made at 5 nm.

Its core designs are now grouped into four families on its website: Essential for embedded uses, Intelligence for vector and machine-learning work, Performance for application processors and Automotive. The P550 core, launched in June 2021, was adopted by Intel’s foundry business for a RISC-V development platform called Horse Creek, English Wikipedia says. In December 2019 Samsung announced it would use SiFive cores, and in 2020 the AI-chip company Tenstorrent licensed the Intelligence X280, according to the same article. In September 2022, SiFive announced that NASA had selected its cores for a future spaceflight computer.

The HiFive boards gave developers hardware to work on. The HiFive Unleashed of February 2018 carried four U54 cores; the HiFive Unmatched of October 2020 was a Mini-ITX board that Canonical’s Ubuntu went on to support in June 2021. The current line includes the HiFive Premier P550, announced in April 2024, alongside a newer development server the company calls BigSky.

The company makes large claims about its reach. Its website says SiFive IP powers more than two billion devices, that it has more than 400 RISC-V design wins, and that 85 percent of its employees are engineers; those are the company’s own figures. Its RISC-V history page says Google, Meta and NVIDIA are embracing the architecture for AI work.

Design and documentation.

Chip-design software and semiconductor IP are hard things to picture. The products are programs, licences and blocks of circuitry that customers place inside their own chips, so the companies that sell them have to borrow images from the work itself. The most common is the chip floor-plan: a die seen from above, its functional blocks lit in bright colour, or the stacked metal routing layers of a layout drawn as glowing lines on a dark ground.

Abstract circuit lines do much of the remaining work. Thin traces, right-angled paths and grids of contact points stand in for a product that no one can hold, and they travel easily from a website banner to a trade-show wall. Alongside them come pictures of people at work: engineers in front of multi-monitor layouts, waveforms and schematics on the screens, the design shown in progress rather than finished.

The trade has its own stages. The Design Automation Conference is where, according to English Wikipedia, Mentor Graphics introduced its first product in 1982, and booths there and at the RISC-V Summit carry the same chip renders, circuit patterns and demonstration screens. Keynote stages follow a familiar pattern too: a chief executive in front of a roadmap slide, with process nodes, product generations and partner names set out across the screen.

This guide looks past those shared images to what can be checked about each company: who founded it, who owns it now, which tools or IP it is known for, and which events in its history — mergers, takeovers, export-control cases — shaped the name it trades under. Where a claim rests only on a company’s own word, we say so.

Independent, venture-funded and international.

SiFive has stayed privately held, funded by a series of venture rounds. Investors named by English Wikipedia include Sutter Hill Ventures, Spark Capital, Intel Capital, Qualcomm Ventures, SK Hynix, Saudi Aramco and Coatue. The company bought the chip-design firm Open-Silicon in June 2018, folded its custom-chip work into a unit called OpenFive in August 2020, and in March 2022 sold OpenFive to Alphawave IP, which also licensed SiFive processor designs as part of the deal.

A sale of SiFive itself was discussed. Reports of Intel’s interest emerged in June 2021; on 21 October 2021 CRN, citing Bloomberg, reported that the talks had ended over financial terms and how Intel would integrate SiFive’s technology, and that SiFive planned to stay independent and eventually go public. A SiFive spokesperson told CRN that Intel remained “a valued partner.” In October 2023 the company cut about a fifth of its staff, English Wikipedia reports, citing Reuters.

On 9 April 2026 SiFive announced a Series G round led by Atreides Management, with NVIDIA and Apollo Global Management among the investors, aimed at its datacenter roadmap. English Wikipedia, citing Reuters, says the company described it as its final private round before a possible stock-market listing; at the time of writing SiFive remains private.

The headquarters is in Santa Clara, California, although CRN described the company as San Mateo-based in 2021. Its website lists offices in Austin, Berkeley, the Boston area, Shanghai, La Ciotat in France, three Indian cities, Tokyo, Seongnam in South Korea, Hsinchu in Taiwan and Cambridge, England. The Cambridge office opened in July 2022, the Cambridge Independent reported that August, when SiFive became training-wear sponsor of Cambridge United for the 2022/23 and 2023/24 seasons.

For a design guide, SiFive shows how a company built on an open standard still has to make a brand of its own. Compare Arm, the proprietary architecture it is most often measured against, and Andes Technology, another RISC-V core licensor. For this guide we use slate, a pale grey and a copper with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep SiFive’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.