With $100M raised, Akeana unveils new RISC-V chip designs

Akeana, the company trying to change semiconductor design, has raised over $100 million in funding in the past three years to design RISC-V processors. Now it’s launching products.

Today’s launch marks the formal availability of the company’s product line of intellectual property solutions that are uniquely customizable for any workload or application.

Formed by the same team that designed Marvell’s ThunderX2 server chips, Akeana offers highly customizable IP solutions for all semiconductor markets, ranging from microcontrollers to mobile to automotive and cloud computing.

Akeana wants to move the industry beyond the status quo of legacy vendors and architectures, like Arm, with equitable licensing options and processors that fill and exceed current performance gaps.

As for AI involvement, Akeana said it is deeply engaged with many tier one customers on AI compute, and the company has solutions that are being evaluated. Akeana will include AI accelerated 1000-series (In-Order) processors, that support AI datatypes, processing and data bandwidth requirements.

The new products

Akeana released three processor lines and SoC IP, in tandem with the formal launch of the company, all
ready for customer delivery, including:

Akeana 100 Series: a line of highly configurable processors with 32-bit RISC-V cores that supports applications from embedded microcontrollers to edge gateways, to personal computing devices. Akeana 100 is the base design in Akeana’s processor line, scaling from one to dozens of cores.

Akeana 1000 Series: a processor line that includes 64-bit RISC-V cores and an MMU to support rich operating systems, while maintaining low power and requiring low die area. These processors optionally support multi-threading, vector extension, hypervisor extension and other extensions that are part of recent and upcoming RISC-V profiles, as well as optional AI computation extensions.

Akeana 5000 Series: a line of extreme performance processors representing industry performance leadership, outperforming established competitors and the RISC-V ecosystem. This line provides ultimate differentiation with 64-bit RISC-V cores optimized for demanding applications in next-gen devices, laptops, data centers, and cloud infrastructure. These processors are compatible with the Akeana 1000 Series at a much higher single thread performance.

Processor System IP: a collection of IP blocks needed for creation of processor SoCs, including a coherent cluster cache block, I/O MMU, and Interrupt Controller. Akeana also enables the implementation of advanced features for customers with advanced IP solutions for large coherent mesh multi-core systems.

All the processors, systems, and Interconnect IPs are available now, so customers can start working today with Akeana intellectual property.

Broad support

The company has over $100 million in capital, with support from A-list investors including Kleiner Perkins, Mayfield, and Fidelity.

AI Matrix computation engine: designed to offload Matrix Multiply operations for AI acceleration. Configurable in size and supporting various data types, it may be attached to the coherent cluster cache block similar to a core for optimal data sharing.

“Our team has a proven track record of designing world-class server chips, and we are now applying that
expertise to the broader semiconductor market as we formally go to market,” said Rabin Sugumar, Akeana CEO, in a statement. “With our rich portfolio of customizable cores and special security, debug, RAS, and telemetry features, we provide our customers with unparalleled performance, observability, and
reliability. We believe our products will revolutionize the industry.”

“The renaissance of silicon, sweeping through our industry, is driving the rise of architectural
innovations like RISC-V,” said Navin Chaddha, managing partner at Mayfield, in a statement. “Akeana has everything needed to become a breakout company – a world-class team of founders and investors, the most comprehensive IP, a fair licensing model, and a compelling value proposition for aiding chipmakers in designing workload-optimized silicon solutions. I look forward to partnering with Rabin and the team in the next phase of their journey.”

“The migration to RISC-V is in full flight,” said Mamoon Hamid, partner at Kleiner Perkins, in a statement. “The majority of top semiconductor firms are transitioning to RISC-V, with many choosing Akeana due to its best in class performance.”

Akeana’s team of seasoned professionals, coupled with its commitment to delivering game-changing solutions, for data and AI-intensive use cases, makes it a new driving force in the industry –providing customers with cutting-edge capabilities to meet their unique semiconductor design needs. Akeana is a proud member of the RISC-V board of directors and is also participating in the RISE project to accelerate
the availability of software for RISC-V.

Akeana is a driving force of change in semiconductor IP innovation and performance, on a mission to
deliver world-class RISC-V-based compute, interconnect, and accelerator IP solutions.

Headquartered in San Jose, California, this venture-funded startup is dedicated to empowering customers with highly configurable technology and equitable licensing options, moving beyond the limitations of today’s legacy vendors and architectures.

With an experienced team of engineers, Akeana is at the forefront of easy-to-optimize semiconductor IP. Its growing patent portfolio reflects a commitment to meet the industry’s ever-evolving needs and challenges.

Akeana has more than 150 employees.

To offload the computation-intensive matrix operation, Akeana has developed an ultra-high performance per watt matrix accelerator with optimized processor system data movement. Akeana’s AI solutions will be announced at a later date.

As far as competition goes, Akeana said it is a pure IP company, processors and processor system IP, so it competes against other processor and processor system IP companies. Clearly, ARM is a main competitor as it is the incumbent in this space, but other competitors include RISC-V IP companies that offer performance processors such as SiFive, MIPS, and Andes. Another set of companies–Tenstorrent, Ventana, and Rivos– have a strategy around SoC and chiplets, with IP as a potential business as well.

The Akeana value proposition over competitors is to deliver the highest performance processors and the broadest product portfolio. Its chips scale to very large multi-core systems and Akeana focuses on customization. To the customers, this means the company offers all the processor IP that they will need, enabling them to achieve highest performance, in minimal time to market.