SiFive Inc. Launches Three New Products That Support Self-Driving Car Technology

SiFive Inc., manufactures three chips for self-driving cars. (photo: SiFive Twitter)

JAKARTA - A startup from Silicon Valley, SiFive Inc., on Tuesday, September 13, launched three new products aimed at the automotive market. The product is emerging in one of the hottest areas for chipmakers for electric and self-driving cars which are expected to increase the number of chips needed.

The newly launched chip designs are the E6-A series for digital control applications such as steering, the S7-A for the so-called "safety island" which acts as a failsafe for other critical applications. There's also the X280-A for managing data from image sensors and doing machine learning work, including for autonomous driving.

"Where you'll see us going is from these targeted computing chips to the array of processors that will be available over the next 12 to 24 months," said SiFive CEO Patrick Little.

Prior to SiFive, Little helped build Qualcomm's automotive business, and says both Qualcomm Inc and Nvidia Corp can be great customers and partners for SiFive.

Qualcomm and Nvidia have both staked their development on the automotive business as big businesses and have launched systems like Snapdragon Ride and NVIDIA DRIVE that automotive customers can use for applications, including autonomous driving.

SiFive does not manufacture chips, but creates blueprints for chipmakers to use. It uses the RISC-V (ISA) instruction set architecture, the basis for building chips that determine what kind of software can run on the chip.

ARM from ARM Ltd's and Intel x86 are the dominant ISAs used today for general purpose processors, or computer brains. RISC-V is an open standard and is gaining traction, especially in China.

SiFive is now competing with Arm which is also targeting the automotive market.

Little said some of the strongest demand for its chip technology has come from customers looking to develop autonomous vehicles.