SiFive, a chip design start-up company based on the RISC-V instruction set architecture, has received an acquisition intention from investor Intel.
A person familiar with the matter, who asked not to be named, said that Intel has offered to buy SiFive for more than $2 billion.
RISC-V with x86 and Arm
As we all know, Intel dominates the industry leader in x86 architecture chip technology, while SiFive focuses on open-source RISC-V technology and employs several founding members of the RISC-V architecture.
For a long time, the field of CPU instruction set architecture has been dominated by x86 and Arm. Since RISC-V was born at the University of California, Berkeley in 2010, it has gradually formed a certain competitive landscape with Arm after more than ten years of development.
With the gradual refinement of the application field, the model of one chip making the world has become a thing of the past. Facing the hot AI and Internet of Things market, RISC-V is becoming a semiconductor IP market with its open-source, free, scalable, and modular features. It is a rising star, and it is considered to be a new hope to compete with Arm and realize the "independent and controllable" core business.
In recent years, the RISC-V instruction architecture set (ISA) ecological lineup has grown rapidly. Thousands of companies around the world have joined the RISC-V Foundation and have launched a large number of RISC-V-based chip products in the past few years.
As a RISC-V commercialization company with the orthodox origin of the RISC-V founding team, SiFive is using the RISC-V architecture to design the computing core and provide chip core IP. Although the underlying architecture of these cores is open source, the specific core design itself can be sold.
The company is trying to introduce open-source standards into the field of semiconductor design to make it cheaper and more acceptable to customers. So far SiFive has established in-depth cooperative relations with many internationally renowned semiconductor manufacturers.
Its CEO Patrick Little is a veteran of the chip industry. During his career, he has served as CEO of eASIC, Senior Vice President of CSR, Senior Vice President of Xilinx, Senior Vice President of Qualcomm, and General Manager of Automotive Business. He joined SiFive from Qualcomm last year when he was Qualcomm's senior vice president in charge of the automotive business.
Since the US GPU giant NVIDIA agreed to acquire the British design company Arm of Japan's SoftBank Group for US$40 billion in September last year, people's interest in SiFive has increased.
If Nvidia's acquisition of Arm is passed, SiFive is regarded as a potential beneficiary, because Arm's customers may reduce their cooperation with Arm because of concerns about competition.
According to data from the US data provider PitchBook, SiFive's last financing was in 2020, when it was valued at approximately US$500 million. Before this, chip giants such as SK Hynix, Intel, and Qualcomm were all investors in SiFive. SiFive also received support from the venture capital department of hardware manufacturer Western Digital.
What can Intel's acquisition of SiFive bring to Intel?
The acquisition of SiFive can give Intel an IP library, which can be used on its own chips or can be licensed to future customers. Intel has previously stated that it plans to license computing cores based on its proprietary x86 architecture to customers as part of its foundry manufacturing business.
At the same time, Intel will also get an upgrade in its software business. SiFive is not only a RISC-V provider. Many concepts are software development. It is committed to making different types of computing chips easier to program. Last year, it hired Chris Latner, a well-known Silicon Valley computer scientist.
Ratner, a former senior director and architect of Apple, created the Swift programming language for Apple. This language has become the main way for developers to write applications for the iPhone and was subsequently poached by Tesla. Recently, Ratner joined Google's parent company Alphabet and entered the Google Brain and TensorFlow artificial intelligence team's programming language team.
People familiar with the matter added that SiFive has been negotiating with potential advisers on how to deal with acquisition interest.
A person familiar with the matter said that in addition to Intel, SiFive has also received acquisition offers from several companies. The person added that Intel has also proposed investment intentions, which may be a more desirable way.
Negotiations are still in the early stages and there is no guarantee that any agreement will be reached. SiFive may choose to remain independent.
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