Former Google and Tesla Engineer Chris Lattner to Lead SiFive Platform

Distinguished Silicon Valley software engineer to bring increased customization and implementation tooling to SiFive SoC design methodology

SAN MATEO, Calif., Jan. 27, 2020 – SiFive, Inc., the leading provider of commercial RISC-V processor IP and silicon solutions, today announced that Chris Lattner, a distinguished Silicon Valley software engineer, has joined the company to lead SiFive Platform Engineering as SVP. Lattner brings 15 years of leadership in software engineering and machine learning infrastructure, leading teams at Apple, Tesla, and most recently, Google. He is credited for authoring Clang, the compiler front-end, and LLVM, the compiler infrastructure open source project.

“I’m thrilled to be joining the SiFive team and for the opportunity to work with a company that is enabling the future of silicon, all the way from idea to silicon,” said Lattner. “RISC-V offers an exciting opportunity for customizable chips, and SiFive’s RISC-V design methodology is unmatched in the industry. By making custom SoC development more accessible, we can accomplish technological breakthroughs that couldn’t happen anywhere else.”

Lattner has a reputation for engineering excellence. During a decade-long stint with Apple, he spearheaded the creation of Swift, the programming language used to build the current generation of iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, Mac, and Apple TV apps. As the driving force behind the influential LLVM and Clang projects that brought speed, safety, portability, and power to developers by providing scalable frameworks to programmatically generate machine native code, and with additional contributions to Tesla Autopilot and Google TPU, Lattner is set to evolve and enhance SiFive’s scalable engineering capabilities as part of SiFive’s mission to simplify the enablement of designing custom cores and SoCs.

“SiFive is on a mission to democratize access to custom silicon, and innovative leaders in the industry are taking notice,” said Dr. Naveed Sherwani, president and CEO of SiFive. “Chris has made significant contributions to the software used by millions of developers today. This is a significant period of strategic growth for us, and we are thrilled to welcome Chris to our product engineering practice.”

SiFive enables the configuration and production of domain-specific hardware to suit software optimized solutions. Most recently, the company announced a partnership with CEVA to simplify the creation of processors capable of supporting smart home, automobile, robotics, IoT, and industrial applications.

Lattner holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from the University of Portland. Read his introductory blog here.

About SiFive

SiFive is on a mission to free semiconductor roadmaps and declare silicon independence from the constraints of legacy ISAs and fragmented solutions. As the leading provider of market-ready processor core IP and silicon solutions based on the free and open RISC-V instruction set architecture SiFive helps SoC designers reduce time-to-market and realize cost savings with customized, open-architecture processor cores, and democratizes access to optimized silicon by enabling system designers in all markets to build customized RISC-V based semiconductors. Founded by the inventors of RISC-V, SiFive has 16 design centers worldwide and backing from Sutter Hill Ventures, Qualcomm Ventures, Spark Capital, Osage University Partners, Chengwei, Huami, SK Hynix, Intel Capital, and Western Digital. For more information, please visit www.sifive.com.

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