- General
- September 18, 2020
- 4 minutes read
SiFive Poaches Qualcomm Veteran As CEO
Patrick Little. Photo credit: ETC-USC on Flickr, under Creative Commons license SiFive, a fabless semiconductor upstart, has announced that…
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| Patrick Little.
Photo credit: ETC-USC on Flickr, under Creative Commons license
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SiFive, a fabless semiconductor upstart, has announced that it’s appointed a new President and Chief Executive Officer by the name of Patrick Little, who is joining from semiconductor giant Qualcomm where he served as a Senior Vice President and General Manager. Little is taking over from Naveed Sherwani, who has relinquished his CEO role at SiFive but will continue as Chairman of the company’s board. The leadership change comes on the heels of SiFive closing a $61 million Series E funding to further its development of RISC-V based chip designs for high-growth markets such as artificial intelligence, computational storage, and automotive design. Since its inception, SiFive has raised a total of $190 million in equity funding.
SiFive’s leadership change notably comes on the heels of Arm, the leading developer of RISC-V chip designs, reaching a deal to be acquired by chipmaker Nvidia for a whopping $40 billion. It’s such that the acquisition of Arm by another chip giant has spurred interest into SiFive’s products from potential customers, customers who are worried about Nvidia possibly taking control of Arm and raising prices or making it harder for its competitors to use Arm technology. Nvidia has, however, promised that it’ll continue to maintain Arm’s business neutrality.
SiFive’s new CEO, Patrick Little, has over 30 years of experience in the semiconductor industry under his belt. Before joining Qualcomm, the had stints at other semiconductor companies like Xilinx, CSR Technology, and eASIC, where he served as CEO. Little holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from San Jose State University, implying a very long and deep alignment with the semiconductor and hardware industry.
SiFive was founded in 2015 by Krste Asanović, Yunsup Lee, and Andrew Waterman, three researchers from the University of California Berkeley who had earlier invented the RISC-V computer architecture. The San Mateo, California-based company is backed by investors including Qualcomm Ventures, Intel Capital, Western Digital, and venture capital firm Sutter Hill Ventures. SiFive currently has 15 design centers worldwide. The company employs over 400 people.
