SiFive has won the 101st semiconductor design award for open source hardware instruction set architecture (ISA) ‘RISC-V’.
ISA is the lowest level programming interface for machine instructions that a microprocessor can recognize and understand. A physical implementation of this is called a microarchitecture. With open source ISA, core processors can be designed based on the desired architecture specifications without paying for expensive licensing or royalties.
SiFive is a company founded by UC Berkeley University researchers who developed the open source ISA ‘RISC-V’ and helps customers quickly design semiconductors to take advantage of the RISC-V architecture. Once the customer sets the specification, SiFive will go through the design with RISC-V and license it to the customer.
To read more, please visit: http://www.kipost.net/news/articleView.html?idxno=201212. Please note that the original article is in Korean.