EE Journal Article: The Bisquick Alternative

“Our vision is to enable two guys in a garage to build a custom chip.” Thus spake Jack Kang, Vice President of SiFive, the 40-person startup making RISC-V chips. SiFive isn’t just another company pulling the RISC-V bandwagon. They’re trying to change the way we create SoCs. The au courant open-source processor design is just a means to that end.
Like Esperanto, SiFive is quite happy using RISC-V as the basis for its technology, but it isn’t particularly wedded to the architecture. What the company really wants to do is to simplify the arduous process of designing an application-specific SoC to the point where it becomes a non-issue. Instead of investing millions of dollars in EDA tools and engineering talent, and spending millions of hours (or so it seems) on circuit design and verification, SiFive wants to make it as simple as signing a check.
SiFive wants to become the Bisquick mix of SoCs.
To read more, please visit: https://www.eejournal.com/article/the-bisquick-alternative/