HiFive

HiFive is a brand of development boards and modules produced by SiFive, a company that designs RISC-V cores and related hardware. The HiFive line is intended to demonstrate and enable development on the RISC-V instruction set architecture and to support software development across the RISC-V ecosystem.

The line includes several boards aimed at different audiences. HiFive1 is a compact, embedded development board based on a 32-bit RISC-V microcontroller core and is targeted at education and hobbyist projects. It supports common embedded toolchains and development workflows. HiFive Unleashed is a higher-end board designed to run Linux on a 64-bit RISC-V core, providing a platform for more advanced software development and experimentation. It offers standard peripherals and expansion interfaces suitable for developing drivers, operating systems, and applications for RISC-V Linux.

Over time, additional HiFive models have appeared to broaden the range of performance and form factors, including variants aimed at professional and research use. The exact specifications, such as processor cores, memory, and I/O options, vary by model, but the intent across the HiFive lineup is to provide accessible hardware that showcases RISC-V capabilities.

Software and ecosystem support for HiFive boards centers on SiFive’s Freedom Tools and GCC-based toolchains, along with community-supported software and Linux distributions tailored to RISC-V. The boards have been used in education, research, and industry to prototype and evaluate operating systems, drivers, and applications on real RISC-V hardware.

Impact: HiFive helped accelerate early access to RISC-V hardware and stimulated community engagement around RISC-V development and tooling.