Akeana USA Inc., a startup that develops chips based on the RISC-V processor architecture, launched today with more than $100 million in initial funding.
The capital was provided by a consortium that included Kleiner Perkins, Mayfield and Fidelity. The funding will put Akeana in a better position to drive demand for its product line, a collection of chip designs that companies can use to build central processing unit cores and related semiconductor components. The product line moved into general availability in conjunction with the company’s launch today.
Akeana was started in 2021 by former Marvell Technology Inc. engineers. During their time at the publicly traded chipmaker, the founders designed its ThunderX2 line of server processors. The chip line, which debuted in 2018, is based on Arm Holdings plc’s popular CPU architecture.
Akeana’s CPU core designs are based not on Arm technology but rather RISC-V, a competing processor architecture distributed under an open-source license. It has gained significant traction in recent years thanks partly to its cost-effectiveness. Because RISC-V is free, users can avoid the licensing fees that Arm charges for its technology.
Akeana’s portfolio of CPU core designs is organized into three product families. Each targets a different set of use cases.
The first product family, the Akeana 100 series, is a collection of 32-bit CPU cores designed to power “internet of things” gadgets and other simple devices. It’s available alongside the more advanced Akeana 1000, which is optimized for products such as advanced driver assistance systems. The CPU designs in this product family swap the Akeana 100’s 32-bit design for a 64-bit architecture that can hold more data at any given time and process it faster.
Rounding out the company’s product portfolio is the Akeana 5000 series. It offers higher single-thread performance than the Akeana 1000 as well as a significantly larger onboard cache. Akeana’s engineers have also added a faster MMU, the component that coordinates the flow of data between a CPU’s logic circuits and memory modules.
The company says that the Akeana 5000 lends itself to powering a variety of devices ranging from laptops to data center servers. Optionally, processors that use the design can also incorporate circuits based on the lower-end Akeana 1000 series of CPU blueprints. In chips that include multiple types of cores, simple workloads can be relegated to the slowest cores to save power and extend the host device’s battery life.
Akeana sells its flagship CPU core designs alongside blueprints for other processor components. The company provides a CCB, or compute coherence block, that can be used to link together multiple CPU cores into a single processor. It also offers components for related tasks such as managing interruptions, situations in which a processor must pause the application that it’s running and launch a different program.
“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 Akeana Chief Executive Officer Rabin Sugumar.
The chipmaker told VentureBeat that its processor designs are currently being evaluated by several customers. Akeana describes those customers as “tier one” companies, which means they’re major players in their respective markets.