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SK Hynix headquarters in South Korea SK Hynix Inc., South Korea’s major chipmaker, decided to make an additional investment in a US chip design startup SiFive in order to secure system semiconductor technology.SK Hynix, the world’s second-largest memory chipmaker, is set to participate in a 200 billion won ($167.3 million) in Series F funding for SiFive, according to investment banking industry sources on Sunday. The South Korean semiconductor giant was known to chip in some 100 billion won.“SK Hynix evaluates SiFive’s semiconductor design technology as a game-changer in the future market,” said an industry source.In August 2020, SK Hynix invested 37.5 billion won in SiFive’s Series E funding to obtain an 8.5% stake in the startup and become a member of its board of directors. The South Korean company decided on the additional investment to prevent dilution of its stake due to the rights offering.SiFive, founded by Krste Asanovic, a professor at UC Berkeley, and Lee Yunsup a South Korean national with a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in 2015, designs customized semiconductors for Internet of things (IoT), wearable and artificial intelligence devices.ARM’S RIVALThe Silicon Valley startup is considered as a competitor to ARM Ltd. currently dominates the global semiconductor design market. ARM receives royalties for graphic processing units from Samsung Electronics Co., Qualcomm Inc. and Nvidia Corp. On the other hand, SiFive has unveiled the RISC-V architecture for free, expanding its customer base.SiFive is expected to lead the changes in the semiconductor design market since Nvidia last year acquired ARM. The industry predicted SiFive’s open-source processor architecture may replace the ARM CPU cores.The startup has raised $185 million so far since its inception in 2015. Its investors include Intel Corp. Qualcomm, Western Digital Corp., Saudi Aramco, SK Telecom Co. and Samsung Venture Investment Corp. Samsung Venture, another member of the board of directors, was slated to join SK Hynix’s additional investment.SiFive was understood to have hoped its corporate value at 2.5 trillion won, five times of 500 billion won estimated during the previous Series E funding.Intel had proposed $2 billion to take over the management right of SiFive last year, but they failed to narrow differences during negotiations.By Si-Eun Park and Jong-Woo Kimseeker@hankyung.comJongwoo Cheon edited this article.
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