The Road Ahead

The progress RISC-V has made in the past few years is amazing. The leap from being an ISA deployed for basic embedded cores to powering high performance applications in consumer products, datacenters, autonomous vehicles, and next generation wearables, has come faster and stronger than anyone anticipated. The RISC-V community has grown from a few dozen contributors to more than 3,900 members – spanning markets, applications, and geographies. The ISA has become foundational technology for the entire semiconductor industry, and we are now witnessing the beginning of a profound shift toward RISC-V. Some of the world’s largest and most influential technology companies have joined our ranks and further strengthened our ecosystem, a community which, over time, will rival all others. Qualcomm and Google’s recent announcement of their collaboration on a RISC-V based wearables platform that will power next generation Wear OS solutions is a groundbreaking milestone that will pave the way for more RISC-V products within the ecosystem. This further highlights the relevance and momentum of RISC-V’s unstoppable march.

RISC–V is clearly real, growing rapidly and here to stay!

At SiFive, we are urgently re-inventing computing. We have been driving the RISC-V transformation since its inception and our products are being integrated by the most talented designers, in the most innovative products, across the global semiconductor industry.

Smart, fast-growing businesses regularly pause to take a hard look at their priorities to ensure their strategies, workflows, capabilities, and people are fully aligned. After years of rapid growth, we looked at SiFive’s business and saw the need to realign our operations with the forward-looking objectives of the company. While preserving our nimbleness and close collaboration with customers, we identified a need to refocus our priorities and our resources on the most promising opportunities.

The resulting restructuring has created a lot of discussion and some misplaced speculation amongst the RISC‑V and semiconductor communities. I feel it is important to share our rationale with you.

SiFive today is in tremendous shape. We are deliberately building a company that can and will outperform in any environment – and in the long run. We are very well funded for years to come, with engaged, highly supportive investors, and we are realizing revenues and compounding royalties from many of the world’s leading semiconductor companies. We continue to heavily invest in advanced R&D to extend our technological leadership, while also working to accelerate the delivery and support of industry-leading products that exceed our customers’ expectations.

We take immense pride in our open culture and talented employees. Undertaking the reorganization involved difficult decisions, yet strategically, I believe it was required for us to grow and continue to lead our industry forward. We wish all our colleagues well.

SiFive continues to deliver the broadest and highest performing portfolio of RISC‑V products in the world. Our IP has been integrated into countless products and is shipping in high-volume silicon today. We continue to add to our list of industry firsts, and to our portfolio, including the products we announced earlier this month – the SiFive Performance P870 and SiFive Intelligence X390.

Our four product-family commitment remains unchanged, with Essential, Intelligence, Performance, and Automotive solutions. With these product lines we are well positioned to drive growth and take advantage of the biggest opportunities of this era: AI, ADAS, Electric Vehicles, Wearables, Mobile, and more. We have exciting new opportunities in AI applications – and with consumer products like wearables and mobile as Google brings Android to the RISC-V ecosystem. In automotive, we are increasingly being selected for the cars of the future. Our broad portfolio lets customers meet their product goals whether designing an embedded device or looking to do generative AI in the datacenter– where our solutions all share the common RISC-V software ecosystem.

Every industry is focused on implementing AI and we are capturing new growth as the shift to AI accelerates a new era of high-performance computing. As a result, the semiconductor industry benefits more than ever from RISC-V. AI applications come down to a combination of high-performance general-purpose compute and programmable specialized accelerators with extreme performance. The challenge is the need for improved power efficiency and compute density (in addition to programmability and flexibility), and that’s why RISC-V is fast becoming the ecosystem of choice. With AI integrated into everything, RISC-V is becoming a critical ingredient. Today in AI there is excitement about transformers, but what will tomorrow bring? The flexibility of SiFive’s solutions allows customers to respond to these continuous changes.

We have adapted our organization to strengthen our agility and capture emerging growth opportunities, more deeply partner with our industry leading customers, accelerate the execution of our advanced roadmaps, and continue to extend our position as the global RISC-V leader.

SiFive’s growth has never been stronger, our opportunities have never been better – and I have never been more confident that SiFive will revolutionize computing, with RISC-V, in ways we have not yet begun to imagine.

Keep moving forward!

Patrick