Akeana

About Akeana

Akeana is a semiconductor intellectual property (IP) provider established in early 2021, specializing in the open-source RISC-V architecture. The company was founded by a team of engineers, including CEO Rabin Sugumar, Nitin Rajmohan, and Abbas Rashid, who were instrumental in designing Marvell's ThunderX2 server chips. This background in creating high-performance server processors informs Akeana's strategy to deliver a broad range of processor and system IP. The firm operates on a pure IP licensing model, providing its technology to semiconductor companies for integration into their own chip designs. Since its inception, Akeana has secured over $100 million in funding from investors such as Kleiner Perkins, Mayfield, and Fidelity.

The company's business model centers on offering a highly configurable and scalable portfolio of RISC-V IP, aiming to compete with established architectures like Arm by providing equitable licensing options. Akeana's core innovation lies in generating its entire range of processor cores from a single, highly configurable System Verilog database, which allows for efficient development and maintenance. Its product offerings span from low-power microcontrollers to high-performance cores for data centers, covering a wide array of markets including IoT, automotive, mobile computing, and cloud applications. Clients can customize IP blocks to meet specific computational and bandwidth requirements.

Akeana’s product portfolio is structured into several series. The Akeana 100 Series consists of 32-bit RISC-V cores for embedded microcontrollers and edge devices. The Akeana 1000 Series features 64-bit cores with a Memory Management Unit (MMU) to support complex operating systems, targeting applications like advanced driver-assistance systems. At the high end, the Akeana 5000 Series is designed for demanding applications in laptops and data center servers, offering higher single-thread performance. Beyond CPU cores, Akeana supplies essential system IP, including coherent and non-coherent interconnects, interrupt controllers, I/O MMUs, and AI accelerators, enabling clients to build complete system-on-chip (SoC) solutions.