SiFive and DARPA collaborate to bring the power of RISC-V to Technology Innovation

Licensing agreement provides access to a broad portfolio of IP from the inventors of RISC-V

SAN MATEO, Calif. – March 31, 2021 – SiFive, Inc., the leading provider of commercial RISC-V processor IP and silicon solutions, today announced an open licensing agreement with the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to accelerate technology innovation as part of the DARPA Toolbox Initiative. SiFive will provide access to a broad portfolio of IP to create differentiated processor cores, using the free, open RISC-V ISA standard invented by the founders of SiFive.

“Extending access to SiFive’s industry-leading portfolio of RISC-V-based processor, security, trace, and debug IP to the DARPA Toolbox program will help participants develop new and innovative solutions to modern computing challenges,” said Chris Jones, VP, Product Marketing, SiFive. “SiFive’s silicon-proven portfolio of RISC-V processor IP includes the tools and support needed to enable next-generation research and development projects.”

DARPA Toolbox is an agency-wide effort aimed at providing open licensing opportunities with commercial technology vendors to the researchers behind DARPA programs. Through DARPA Toolbox, successful proposers will receive access to commercial vendors' technologies and tools via pre-negotiated, low-cost, non-production access frameworks and simplified legal terms. For commercial vendors, DARPA Toolbox will provide an opportunity to leverage the agency's forward-looking research and a chance to develop new revenue streams based on achievements developed with their technologies.

“DARPA Toolbox participants benefit from simpler and lower-cost access to IP without having to negotiate licensing and access terms, leaving them more time to advance science to benefit the nation,” said Serge Leef, Program Manager, DARPA Microsystems Technology Office. “SiFive’s participation in the program will enable research and development based on their wide range of configurable IP based on the open specification RISC-V ISA.”

SiFive will offer DARPA Toolbox participants access to 64- and 32-bit processor cores for application-capable or embedded use, based on multiple RISC-V ISA microarchitectures aligned to different use cases. The SiFive Core IP portfolio of U, S, and E cores are available in pre-configured standard cores of varying performance levels (known as 2, 3, 5, and 7-series). SiFive Core IP is configurable using the award-winning SiFive Core Designer and can scale from mix+match multi-core cluster capabilities to single-core instances. SiFive also offers SiFive Shield, a pre-integrated SoC security solution, SiFive Insight, a pre-integrated advanced trace and debug solution, and a hardware cryptographic accelerator (HCA).

SiFive Core IP has been adopted worldwide and is available in products by leading technology companies including Architek, BBC Learning, BeagleBoard, Bouffalo Lab, Coherent Logix, eTopus, Innovium, FADU, Huami, MicroChip, Synaptics, Qualcomm, and Samsung.

About SiFive

SiFive is the leading provider of processor cores, accelerators, and SoC IP to create domain-specific architecture based on the free and open RISC-V instruction set architecture. SiFive offers scalable, configurable processor cores pre-integrated with security, trace, and debug features for workload-specific accelerator designs. Founded by the inventors of RISC-V, SiFive has 15 design centers worldwide and backing from Sutter Hill Ventures, SK hynix, Qualcomm Ventures, Western Digital, Intel Capital, Spark Capital, Osage University Partners, and Prosperity7 Ventures. For more information, please visit www.sifive.com.