Updated with new statement from SiFive

SiFive Inc., a well-funded startup that develops RISC-V processors, has let go 20% of its employees and discontinued its core product line.

Semiconductor industry journalist Ian Cutress reported the development today, citing people familiar with the matter. SiFive confirmed the high-level details of the report in a statement.

In a second statement issued Tuesday afternoon, the company said that “as we identify and focus on our greatest opportunities, SiFive is shifting to best meet our customers’ fast-changing requirements by undergoing a strategic refocusing of all our global teams. Unfortunately, with this realignment, approximately 20% of employees across all different business groups and levels were impacted. The employees are receiving severance and outplacement assistance.”

 The company added that “we are well funded for years in the future and continue to work with the market leaders in every segment. We remain focused on our four product groups, essential, intelligence, performance and automotive, and as we explained in a press event earlier this month, have a robust roadmap to meet the needs of these markets.”

SiFive was founded in 2016 by the inventors of the RISC-V instruction set architecture. An instruction set architecture is a collection of technologies that can be used to build central processing units. Unlike Arm Holdings plc’s market-leading CPU blueprints, RISC-V is free, which has helped it garner significant industry interest in recent years.

The company has developed a line of ready-to-use CPU cores based on RISC-V. Those cores are optimized for tasks such as running artificial intelligence applications and powering car subsystems. In addition to offering predesigned silicon, SiFive develops custom RISC-V chips for companies with more specialized requirements.

Between 2020 and 2022, the company also competed in the interconnect market. It operated a business unit called OpenFive that developed technologies for tasks such as linking together chiplets and adding USB support to processors. Last May, SiFive sold the unit to fellow chipmaker Alphawave IP Group plc for $210 million.

It’s unclear exactly how many employees have been let go as part of SiFive’s newly disclosed workforce reduction. The sources cited in today’s report estimate the number ranges from 100 to more than 300. According to its website, SiFive’s engineering team included more than 180 staffers who comprised over 85% of its total workforce.

As part of the restructuring initiative, the company is also believed to have discontinued its line of predesigned RISC-V processor cores. From now on, it’s expected to focus primarily on designing custom cores for customers.

Though SiFive may have discontinued its predesigned core portfolio, certain components of the product line could still prove useful for the company going forward. 

Customers can integrate SiFive’s predesigned cores with other compute modules to build systems-on-chip, or SOCs. To support such projects, the company ships its cores with a debugging tool that can be used to test the reliability of a processor design before manufacturing. Now that SiFive engineers will reportedly focus exclusively on designing custom cores, they could use the company’s debugging software to support their work.

SiFive’s predesigned cores also shipped with an array of internally developed cybersecurity components. One of those components is designed to generate encryption keys, while the others focus on tasks such as blocking attempts to tamper with a chip’s memory. SiFive could potentially incorporate those technologies into the custom cores it will design for clients going forward.

The reported layoffs come at a time when industry interest in RISC-V appears to be growing. Earlier this year, five publicly traded chipmakers formed a joint venture to drive the adoption of the instruction set architecture in the auto sector and beyond. More recently, Qualcomm Inc. teamed up with Google LLC to develop RISC-V processors for wearable devices such as smartwatches.

Image: SiFive