LAHORE: An intellectual property tech startup SiFive, based in Silicon Valley headed by a Pakistani-American CEO and fellow NED University alumnus, Dr Naveed Sherwani has raised $50.6 million in series C funding.
Amongst the investors in SiFive are Western Digital, the hard-drive manufacturer, Intel Capital, Spark Capital and Sutter Hill Ventures.
SiFive is a fabless semiconductor company that produces computer chips based on the RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA). SiFive’s products include SoC’s and development boards. SiFive is the first company to produce a chip that implements the RISC-V ISA.
In a comment to TechCrunch, Dr Naveed Sherwani said: “The way we view it, is that we think we should not depend on people learning special languages and things of that nature to be able to modify the architecture and enhance the architecture.”
“What we believe is there could be a high-level interface, which is what we’re building, which will allow people to take existing cores, bring them into their design space, and then apply a configuration. Moving those configurations, you can modify the core, and then you can get the new modified core.
That’s the approach we take, we don’t have to learn a special language or be an expert, it’s the way we present the core. We’d like to start with cores that are verified, and each of these modifications does not cause to become non-verifiable.”
Mr Sherwani obtained a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Karachi’s NED Engineering University in 1983 and got a PhD in computer engineering from the University of Nebraska and is a serial entrepreneur.
Also, he has written four books and over 100 research papers and has taught at Western Michigan University.
He headed Intel’s ASIC division and then launched Open-Silicon a fabless semiconductor company that offered turn-key custom ASIC solutions and was the CEO of Peernova before joining SiFive as its chief executive officer.
