SAN JOSE, Calif. — SiFive will try to build an easier, cheaper, faster way to design chips with a new $50.6 million funding round that included Huami, the venture arm of China’s Xiaomi. The series C aims to bring the startup to profitability and establish a broad market for its RISC-V cores.

SiFive will release a cloud service for designing RISC-V cores this year. It will expand it into an SoC design platform next year with silicon blocks from partners, said Naveed Sherwani, an industry veteran named chief executive of SiFive last July after 10 years at Open Silicon.

At an event announcing the funding, Sherwani made several ambitious promises he said would amount to a revolution in SoC design.

“Today it takes 9-18 months to finish a chip. In 12-18 months we will release a system that takes besides the two-month’s fab time, just 15-20 days… today people take 30 days to validate RTL, but we will do it in less than 3-5 hours — this is my promise,” he said.

In addition, SiFive’s IP partners will provide blocks at low or no cost until an SoC is in production. Upfront charges for IP can amount to 35 percent of the cost of prototyping an SoC, as much as $5 million in some cases. SiFive aims to reduce those costs as much as 85 percent so users can prototype a chip for roughly $750,000, said Shafy Eltoukhy, who oversees SiFive’s partner program.

“Anyone with a Web interface will be able to design amazing chips and solve problems in their communities,” said Sherwani, vowing to make the service free for universities and developing countries.

Some of SiFive’s promises are “very ambitious,” said market watcher Linley Gwennap of the Linley Group. Speeding up the design process is good, but it doesn’t add differentiation, “so the value of this approach is unclear. Most SoC startups design the most crucial IP blocks on their chips to ensure differentiation,” he said.

Although SiFive may reduce upfront costs, “customers still have to pay for the IP later when they ship product, so the program doesn’t reduce IP cost, it just delays it,” he added.

It’s not yet clear where SiFive’s platform will get traction. The service could give the emerging class of crowdfunded hardware startups an alternative to using off-the-shelf chips. Existing chip designers might find the service useful in lowering costs for SoCs that don’t require custom features.

To date, a handful of established electronics companies such as Microsemi, Nvidia and Western Digital are adopting RISC-V. They see the free instruction set architecture and its growing set of open source implementations as a way to reduce costs of designing their own cores.

Startup Esperanto Technologies announced last fall it is developing a family of high-end processors with RISC-V. And Andes Technology is embracing RISC-V as an alternative to its proprietary cores.