SiFive has announced the next phase of its partnership with Samsung Foundry. The extended partnership will enable and accelerate the development of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning inference and training SoCs based on SiFive RISC-V processors and built using Samsung Foundry technology infrastructure.

The SiFive RISC-V AI SoC Development Platform combines SiFive RISC-V technology, high-speed peripherals, and multiple AI accelerator blocks.

The collaborative effort was further customized with a customer-specific AI inference accelerator IP and an Open Compute Project Microsoft Zipline accelerator, resulting in an AI accelerator SoC tape out on Samsung 2nd generation 14LPP FinFET technology on April 13th, 2021.

The ability to rapidly integrate additional IP to the SiFive RISC-V AI SoC Development Platform enables customers to optimize workload processing with custom SoCs.

The AI accelerator SoC tapeout and inference IP integration utilized SEMIFIVE Platform SoC technology. Featuring verified PCIe Gen. 4 connectivity and quad-channel 32-bit LPDDR4/4X interfaces, SEMIFIVE provides off-the-shelf opportunities to develop custom hardware focused on the AI workload.

According to the company, further development of the AI accelerator SoC by integrating SiFive Intelligence products into the chip will create a heterogeneous compute platform for machine learning that can be tuned to meet the needs of edge AI, automotive, 5G/networking, or data center accelerator needs.