Semiconductor design company SiFive lays off over 100 employees

San Francisco, Oct 25 : Fabless semiconductor company SiFive has reportedly laid off more than 100 employees – over 20 per cent of its workforce.

Several verified professionals from the US-based company wrote about their layoffs on professional community platform Blind.

“We are getting 6-week severance, that’s it,” wrote one such affected employee.

“In same boat, just going to walk-away from my vested shares, juice not worth the squeeze," posted another impacted worker.

The chip design company SiFive was last publicly valued at $2.5 billion in March 2022 and the company’s clients include Cruise, Google and Qualcomm.

SiFive Inc., a well-funded startup that develops RISC-V processors, has reportedly laid off many of its employees and discontinued its core product line.

SiFive was founded in 2016 by the inventors of the RISC-V instruction set architecture.

Those cores are optimized for tasks such as running artificial intelligence (AI) applications and powering car subsystems, reports Silicon Angle.

The company also operated a business unit called OpenFive that developed technologies for linking together chiplets and adding USB support to processors.

Last May, SiFive sold the unit to fellow chipmaker Alphawave IP Group plc for $210 million, said the report.

As part of the restructuring initiative, the company is also believed to have discontinued its line of predesigned RISC-V processor cores.

The reported layoffs come at a time when industry interest in RISC-V appears to be growing.

na/