RISC-V: Open Source Embedded Compute for IoT Hardware Startups and Innovators

The increase in compute-intensive workloads on constrained and Edge IoT devices drives the need for more computing power. This computing power is primarily provided by companies such as ARM and Intel and comes at high licensing and tooling costs for hardware startups. The RISC-V instruction set architecture is free and open with a permissive license for use by anyone to build their own processor cores. Companies that support the RISC-V initiative include Tesla, Google, NVIDIA, Qualcomm, Samsung, Marvell, Oculus, and Western Digital.

For this meetup, we're honored to host Jack Kang, SVP, Customer Experience & Sales at SiFive. Jack will share his perspective on RISC-V and what it means for IoT and hardware innovators. He'll provide an overview of RISC-V, why it matters, and how it fits into the overall semiconductor industry. He'll also share the challenges addressed by RISC-V for hardware startups and how it can enable them.

Jack is part of the founding team at SiFive and oversees the SiFive Sales organization and the Customer Experience (CX) Group, which comprises the sales and marketing teams, the field application engineers, and application engineers. He is responsible for demand generation, sales, technical pre-sales activities as well as post-sales support. Prior to SiFive, Jack held a variety of senior business development, product management, and product marketing roles at both NVIDIA and Marvell, where he had a long track record of successful, large-scale design wins. Jack received his BS degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from UC Berkeley.

Founded by the inventors of RISC-V, SiFive is a fabless semiconductor company and provider of commercial RISC-V processor IP and silicon solutions based on the RISC-V instruction set architecture. SiFive's products include cores, SoCs, IPs, and development boards. SiFive is the first company to produce a chip that implements the RISC-V ISA. SiFive Core IP are complete processors with pre-integrated SiFive Shield, for whole SoC security, and SiFive Insight advanced trace and debug.