SiFive Enhances Silicon Hills Operations with Office in Austin, Texas

Central Texas' Hill Country area populated by high-tech companies is joined by the latest office of the leader in RISC-V semiconductor IP design and development

SAN MATEO, Calif., -- June 18, 2019 --

SiFive, Inc., the leading provider of commercial RISC-V processor IP and silicon solutions, announced today it has further expanded its existing presence in the Austin, Texas, "Silicon Hills" area with the opening of an office to support all aspects of SiFive's business operations. The Austin office will drive company-wide corporate development, business development, legal, and strategy operations, led by long-time semiconductor executives, Keith Witek, SiFive's SVP of corporate development and general counsel, and Hiren Majmudar, the company's VP of business development. There are 14 employees at the SiFive office, located in Bee Cave, covering sales, field application engineering, product, and marketing functions. The office is hiring more employees this year.

"Strong relationships with technology companies are key to SiFive's future success and growth," Witek said. "Austin is a large and growing technology hub, and SiFive's presence here will allow us to strengthen critical business alliances. Our goal is to help customers create new system-on-a-chip (SoC) solutions with the advantages of reduced cost, faster time-to-market, more efficient use of headcount and lower risk, all accelerated through pervasive ecosystem support and the rapid customization and innovation that an open source business models can enable."

The Austin expansion is just the latest demonstration of SiFive's growth and momentum, including marking more than 100 SiFive Core IP design wins and the announcement of key relationships with companies like Qualcomm and Imagination Technologies. SiFive also recently secured $65 million in Series D funding to continue to fuel the innovation and leadership shown by SiFive in the RISC-V ecosystem. Additionally, SiFive has announced a partnership with Avatar Integrated Systems to strengthen cloud-based design capabilities, and a partnership with Quicklogic Corp., to create System-on-Chip (SoC) RISC-V templates to dramatically reduce development cost and time for custom silicon SoC solutions.

"Our mission is to enable everyone, from individual innovators to startups to large multi-national corporations, to create custom hardware for their products with customizable RISC-V IP and cloud-based SoC development," said Majmudar. "With a RISC-V strategy top of mind for many leading semiconductor companies, we will make RISC-V cores, efficient cloud SoC design and SiFive solutions the clear choice for improving design efficiency for teams driving differentiated SoC solutions to market."

Witek brings 30 years of technology, strategy, legal, operations and business experience to SiFive. He holds more than 30 patents in semiconductor and related technologies, and has driven teams that contributed to the formation and execution of Tesla's custom development ecosystem for autopilot solutions, auto communications systems and other Tesla strategic programs; various strategic transactions at AMD involving ATI, GlobalFoundries, outsourced assembly and test operations, DTV business, mobile divisions, and IP development; and the transfer of various technologies into joint partnerships and ventures in China, Russia and other countries. During his time at Motorola, Wilson Sonsini Goodrich and Rosati, AMD and Tesla, Witek led legal, business development, corporate development, venture capital, engineering and strategy teams to drive multinational, strategic programs.

Majmudar recently led Intel Capital's corporate development practice for silicon and IP and brings more than 25 years of business and technology leadership experience to SiFive. During his time at Intel Capital, the world's largest corporate venture capital group, Majmudar spearheaded a renewed focus on equity investments and mergers and acquisitions for silicon design and intellectual property. He also led Intel Capital's investment in SiFive and served as a board observer for the company. Prior to this role, Majmudar built Intel's third-party IP ecosystem and enabled Intel's corporate transition to the world of SoCs. Majmudar also has 15 years of engineering leadership in chip design, EDA development, and software tools sales and marketing.

"Like many other leading semiconductor companies, investing in a physical presence in Austin is a necessary step for SiFive's continued success," said Naveed Sherwani, SiFive CEO. "We have covered Austin extensively since our early days, and now we have a complete infrastructure that is connected to our global operations. This shows not only the talent pool in Austin but the robust capabilities of SiFive. Every semiconductor company needs an answer to continued efficiency and innovation, and we believe this means they need SiFive as their partner for their RISC-V solutions and their cloud SoC development strategy."

About SiFive

SiFive is the leading provider of market-ready processor core IP and silicon solutions based on the free and open RISC-V instruction set architecture. Led by a team of seasoned silicon executives and the RISC-V inventors, SiFive helps SoC designers reduce time-to-market and realize cost savings with customized, open-architecture processor cores, and democratizes access to optimized silicon by enabling system designers in all market verticals to build customized RISC-V based semiconductors. With 15 offices worldwide, SiFive has backing from Sutter Hill Ventures, Qualcomm Ventures, Spark Capital, Osage University Partners, Chengwei, Huami, SK Hynix, Intel Capital, and Western Digital. For more information, www.sifive.com.