Sonics Partners With SiFive To Support Agile RISC-V SoC Design Platform With IP Industry's Most Widely Used NoCs

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- July 2, 2018 -- Sonics, Inc., the world's foremost supplier of on-chip network (NoC) and power management technologies and services, announced a partnership with SiFive, the leading provider of market-ready processor core IP based on the RISC-V instruction set architecture. Sonics and SiFive are enabling an agile RISC-V design platform for systems-on-chip (SoC) by making the Sonics' NoCs interoperable with SiFive's family of RISC-V Core IP. Sonics' NoCs are the IP industry's most widely adopted commercial interconnect fabric and have been shipped in billions of SoCs over the past 20 years. SiFive's Core IPs are the most widely deployed RISC-V CPUs in the world and are the lowest risk, easiest path to RISC-V.

The partnership aims to accelerate SoC integration and time-to-market with highest performance and lowest power consumption for a number of target markets and applications including IoT, mobile, storage, and machine learning/AI. With over 100 member organizations and a robust software ecosystem, RISC-V is positioned to become the standard architecture for modern computing devices, from 32-bit embedded microcontrollers to 64-bit application processors and datacenter accelerators.

Working together, SiFive and Sonics are demonstrating optimized integration between the SiFive E Series CPUs and Sonics' flagship SonicsGN® on-chip network. Interfacing directly to the native TileLink interfaces on the CPU saves area, latency, and power versus bridging to legacy interfaces. Additionally, since both companies deliver their IP through highly flexible generation technology, the joint solution will immediately adapt to new interface choices, ensuring continued interoperability.

"SiFive's founders invented the RISC-V instruction set architecture, which puts them in the driver's seat for customers who want the benefits that open source hardware development offers," said Drew Wingard, CTO of Sonics. "Our NoCs are the most trusted and proven interconnect products in the market and we have been a strong proponent of agile, platform-based SoC design for many years. Pairing SiFive's CPU cores with our NoCs gives chip designers a RISC-V platform solution they can trust to rapidly integrate SoCs."

"Sonics has a history of SoC design success and its NoCs provide the integration flexibility and performance our mutual customers need to create leading edge designs," said Yunsup Lee, co-founder and CTO of SiFive. "We are excited to work with Sonics to deliver an agile RISC-V platform that eases chip integration with uncompromising performance and power. SoC designers who adopt this platform can optimize their designs to meet demanding requirements, while speeding the development process from specification through system integration."

For more information about the Sonics-SiFive partnership, contact your company representative.

About SiFive
SiFive is the leading provider of market-ready processor core IP based on the RISC-V instruction set architecture. Led by a team of industry veterans and founded by the inventors of RISC-V, SiFive helps SoC designers reduce time-to-market and realize cost savings with customized, open-architecture processor cores, and democratizes access to optimized silicon by enabling system designers to build customized RISC-V based semiconductors. SiFive is located in Silicon Valley and has venture backing from Sutter Hill Ventures, Spark Capital, Osage University Partners and Chengwei Capital, along with strategic partners Huami, SK Telecom, Western Digital and Intel Capital. For more information, visit www.sifive.com.

About Sonics, Inc.
Sonics, Inc. (San Jose, Calif.) is the trusted leader in on-chip network (NoC) and power-management technologies used by the world's top semiconductor and electronics product companies, including Broadcom®, Marvell®, MediaTek, and Microchip®. Sonics was the first company to develop and commercialize NoCs, accelerating volume production of complex systems-on-chip (SoC) that contain multiple processor cores. Sonics' ICE-Grain™ Family is the IP industry's first complete Energy Processing Unit (EPU), which enables rapid development of SoC power management subsystems. Sonics holds approximately 150 patent properties supporting customer products that have shipped more than four billion SoCs. For more information, visit sonicsinc.com