ElectronicDesign Article: Startup Esperanto Technologies Raises $58 Million

Esperanto Technologies has raised another $58 million in venture capital to cover the mounting cost of developing chips for machine learning, pushing the company’s funding to $63 million since it was founded in 2014. The company said that it would use its financial war chest to roll out chips that contain thousands of cores using 7-nanometer technology and are based on the RISC-V architecture.
The company is attempting to assemble chips that support the highest number of operation per watt using the RISC-V architecture. Esperanto plans to combine its higher performance ET Maxion cores with thousands of lower power ET Minion cores inside its chips. Minion cores each have accelerators for running floating point operations. The silicon will also be capable of processing tensors, a critical type of data used in machine learning.
Before its latest announcement, Esperanto Technologies had raised $5 million in venture capital. But the company has hired more than a hundred employees, including processor architects, software developers and systems engineers. Western Digital invested in the Silicon Valley-based company last year after swearing to shift its consumption of processors—around two billion cores per year—to chips based on the RISC-V architecture.
 
To read more, please visit: https://www.electronicdesign.com/industrial-automation/startup-esperanto-technologies-raises-58-million.