Two former SiFive executives have joined the executive leadership team of semiconductor design company MIPS.
MIPS, a company focused on the development of high-performance RISC-V compute IP, announced that Drew Barbier has joined as VP of products and Brad Burgess has been named chief architect.
Prior to his three-year stint at SiFive as Fellow, Burgess previously worked for Samsung, AMD, and Intel. Barbier worked at SiFive for six years before joining MIPS, most recently holding the position of senior director of project management.
“I am very excited to have both Drew and Brad join the team at this crucial time in MIPS’ journey as we embark on a new path for the company,” said Sameer Wasson, CEO of MIPS. “Given Drew’s and Brad’s proven track records in the semiconductor IP space with a recent focus on RISC-V, I am confident in their abilities to help drive IP innovation and penetration into new markets.”
According to a statement posted on MIPS website, Barbier will “oversee and further drive MIPS’ product roadmap” as it expands into automotive, cloud, and embedded markets, while Burgess will be responsible for technology architecture and development of all new key roadmap product designs at MIPS.
“I am excited about the opportunities ahead, and I look forward to contributing to MIPS's success in shaping the future of computing through the adoption of RISC-V,” Barbier wrote on LinkedIn, adding that he is “joining a team that is exceptionally well-positioned in this space” due to its rich legacy and commitment to innovation.
In addition to growing its executive team, the company said it would be opening new offices in Dallas and Austin, Texas, in addition to growing the teams in its existing San Jose, California, and Bangalore, India locations.
RISC-V is an open standard instruction set (ISA) architecture based on established RISC (reduced instruction set computing) principles, which is provided under open source licenses that do not require fees.
The MIPS architecture was used in the first commercial RISC processor in the 1980s, which kicked off a movement that included chips from Intel, Motorola, IBM, Digital Equipment, and Sun Microsystems, whose SPARC chips are now owned by Oracle.
The most widespread RISC architecture is from ARM, which is used in very many phones and mobile devices.
MIPS develops low-power, high-performance 32- and 64-bit processor IP cores and architectures for high-end automotive, computing, and communications applications. The company appointed Wasson as its new CEO in September 2023.
Founded in California in 2015, SiFive is a fabless chip company designing RISC-V-based chips. It was one of the first companies to produce RISC-V processors.
