Chris Lattner Is Joining SiFive As SVP Of Platform Engineering

By Amit Chowdhry ● Feb 11, 2020
  • SiFive, a leading provider of commercial RISC-V processor IP and silicon solutions, announced it is hiring Chris Lattner as the SVP of Platform Engineering

SiFive — a leading provider of commercial RISC-V processor IP and silicon solutions — announced that it is hiring Chris Lattner as the SVP of Platform Engineering. Lattner is bringing 15 years of leadership in software engineering and machine learning infrastructure as he led teams at Apple, Tesla, and Google. And he is credited for authoring compiler front-end Clang and compiler infrastruz1cture open source project LLVM.

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.

While working at Apple, Lattner spearheaded the creation of Swift, which is the programming language used to build the current generation of iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, Mac, and Apple TV apps. And he is also credited for being the driving force behind the 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. And 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 & CEO at 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. And 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.

SiFive has been on a mission to free semiconductor roadmaps and declare silicon independence from the constraints of legacy ISAs and fragmented solutions. And 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. Plus the company democratizes access to optimized silicon by enabling system designers in all markets to build customized RISC-V based semiconductors.

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.