SK Hynix has invested in a US Start-up that provides Reduced Instruction Set Compute-V commercial core.
SiFive raised an additional US$60 million in funding from SK Hynix and Saudi Aramco, Reuters reports. Existing investors Intel, Qualcomm and Western Digital also joined the funding round.
A SK Hynix spokesperson said the investment was done to secure future technology and it will reveal how much it put into the US start-up in its third quarter filings.
The California-based start-up has secured a total of US$185 million in funding with the latest round, according to Reuters.
SiFive was founded by UC Berkeley professors Krste Asanovic, Andrew Waterman and Yunsup Lee in 2015. The three unveiled RISC-V, an open source CPU instruction set architecture to challenge Arm core in 2010.
SiFive is selling various commercial core based on the RISC-V architecture.
SK Hynix’s investment into the start-up was likely done so that the company could use the new architecture for its NAND Flash controller and logic chips in image sensors, or used in along side Arm core, people familiar with the matter said.
