SiFive Appoints Patrick Little as President and Chief Executive Officer

SiFive, Inc., the leading provider of commercial RISC-V-based platforms and custom silicon solutions, today announced the appointment of Patrick Little as President and CEO, effective immediately. Mr. Little succeeds Dr. Naveed Sherwani, who has stepped down as President and CEO and will remain Chairman of the board of directors of SiFive as part of a growth plan to accelerate the adoption of SiFive technology for next-generation computing solutions. Recently, SiFive announced the completion of a successful Series E investment round which secured an additional $61M to continue the development of RISC-V based platforms for high-growth markets such as high-performance computing, artificial intelligence and deep learning, automotive, computational storage, and computer vision. This brings investment in the company to $190M to date.

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Patrick Little, President and Chief Executive Officer of SiFive (Photo: Business Wire)

“I am honored to lead the brilliant, hard-working team of innovators and engineers at SiFive who are responsible for creating some of the most impactful architectures in our industry,” said Patrick Little, President and CEO of SiFive. “Across the technology industry, a sharpened focus on workload-acceleration to solve next-generation computing challenges is driving demand for SiFive’s configurable RISC-V-based platforms. Our industry-leading technology portfolio provides a unique platform that empowers our customers to deliver differentiated solutions in their markets.”

Mr. Little joins SiFive from Qualcomm where he led their successful expansion into the automotive industry as Senior Vice President and General Manager. Patrick has over 30 years of operating experience in executive roles in the technology and semiconductor industries, including CEO of eASIC Corp., Senior Vice President of CSR Technology, and Senior Vice President at Xilinx Inc. Patrick has served on the board of directors of numerous public and private technology companies throughout his career. Mr. Little holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from San Jose State University.

“The fast pace of SiFive’s growth and advanced portfolio is directly related to the strength and uniqueness of SiFive’s technology,” said Stefan Dyckerhoff, Managing Director of Sutter Hill Ventures. “The sharpening focus of the technology industry on using high-quality IP based on open-standards continues to create demand for technology that SiFive is uniquely positioned to provide. Industry support for RISC-V has never been stronger, as seen during recent industry events showcasing new, breakthrough designs based on RISC-V.”

“I am pleased and excited to help Patrick elevate SiFive to the next level of success,” said Dr. Naveed Sherwani, Chairman of SiFive’s board of directors. “Patrick's proven expertise in execution and strategy will benefit SiFive tremendously as we continue to increase focus on enabling domain-specific architectures for markets such as high-performance computing, artificial intelligence, and computer vision.”

SiFive’s portfolio of processor Core IP is based on the free and open RISC-V instruction set architecture, invented by the founders of SiFive, 10 years ago. Development of the RISC-V ISA and extensions is governed by RISC-V International, in open working groups composed of technology leaders and company representatives. Designed for scalability, SiFive RISC-V-based platforms can be tailored to customer workload requirements through the highly-configurable parameters of the architecture, and focused using custom instructions.

SiFive recently announced a collaboration with the Barcelona Supercomputing Center to create an open-source new API for popular compilers, further enabling applications to use the RISC-V Vector Extension currently under development for high-performance computing, artificial intelligence, and computer vision applications. SiFive continues to lead the development of the RISC-V ecosystem, enabling support for existing toolchains, operating systems, compilers, and developer environments to integrate RISC-V support into their workflows to simplify the adoption of RISC-V in new designs.

Read more from Patrick on his thoughts about joining SiFive in his blog, here.

About SiFive

SiFive is the leading provider of processor cores, accelerators, and SoC IP to create domain-specific architecture based on the free and open RISC-V instruction set architecture. SiFive offers scalable, configurable processor cores pre-integrated with security, trace, and debug features for workload-specific accelerator designs. Founded by the inventors of RISC-V, SiFive has 15 design centers worldwide and backing from Sutter Hill Ventures, SK hynix, Qualcomm Ventures, Western Digital, Intel Capital, Spark Capital, Osage University Partners, and Prosperity7 Ventures. For more information, please visit www.sifive.com.

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