SiFive and Samsung Foundry Extend Partnership to Accelerate AI SoC Development

Configurable SiFive RISC-V AI SoC Development Platform is built on 14nm Samsung process technology to accelerate custom Machine Learning solutions

SiFive, Inc., the industry leader in RISC-V processors and silicon solutions, announced the next phase of their partnership with Samsung Foundry, a world leader in advanced semiconductor technology. The extended partnership will enable and accelerate the development of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning inference and training SoCs based on SiFive RISC-V processors and built using Samsung Foundry technology infrastructure.

The SiFive RISC-V AI SoC Development Platform combines SiFive RISC-V technology, high-speed peripherals, and multiple AI accelerator blocks. The collaborative effort was further customized with a customer-specific AI inference accelerator IP and an Open Compute Project Microsoft Zipline accelerator, resulting in an AI accelerator SoC tape out on Samsung 2nd generation 14LPP FinFET technology on April 13th, 2021. The ability to rapidly integrate additional IP to the SiFive RISC-V AI SoC Development Platform enables customers to optimize workload processing with custom SoCs.

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The AI accelerator SoC tapeout and inference IP integration utilized SEMIFIVE Platform SoC technology. SEMIFIVE Inc. is the pioneer of platform-based SoC design for the Samsung Foundry ecosystem. Featuring verified PCIe Gen. 4 connectivity and quad-channel 32-bit LPDDR4/4X interfaces, SEMIFIVE provides off-the-shelf opportunities to develop custom hardware focused on the AI workload.

“Samsung Foundry is committed to building a rich and resilient ecosystem with our industry partners,” said Mijung Noh, VP of Foundry Design Service Team at Samsung Electronics. “We are pleased to work with SiFive to accelerate our customers’ AI / ML custom SoC design, illustrating the innovation potential we can achieve together.”

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“Working in partnership with Samsung Foundry has accelerated SiFive’s ability to deliver our highly-efficient and configurable approach for SoC design and implementation,” said Dr. Yunsup Lee, CTO of SiFive. “We’re excited to continue to co-innovate with Samsung Foundry as we launch our latest SiFive Intelligence products to accelerate the development of next-generation AI SoCs with Samsung’s advanced process technology.”

SiFive’s industry-leading portfolio of RISC-V-based processor Core IP scales from the AI-focused SiFive Intelligence line of Linux-capable 64-bit multi-core processors with enhanced RISC-V Vector capabilities to area-optimized real-time cores. SiFive Core IP is silicon-proven and pre-integrated with SiFive Shield, a whole-SoC security solution, SiFive Insight advanced trace and debug capabilities, and optional SiFive hardware cryptographic accelerator (HCA).

Further development of the AI accelerator SoC by integrating SiFive Intelligence products into the chip will create a heterogeneous compute platform for machine learning that can be tuned to meet the needs of edge AI, automotive, 5G/networking, or data center accelerator needs.

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