Baya Programs, a chip know-how firm that desires speed up clever computing, raised $36 million in funding.
Maverick Silicon led the spherical, which additionally included strategic funding from Synopsys and present buyers together with Matrix Companions and Intel Capital reinvesting into the corporate.
The funding will help operational progress, accelerating the event and deployment of the corporate’s software-driven system IP know-how portfolio for system-on-chip (SoC) designs and the rising chiplet financial system.
As clever computing continues to develop, its calls for for AI capabilities, extra environment friendly knowledge motion and compute density are driving the evolution of SoCs into “system-of-chips” fashions. Through the use of chiplets, this new method presents scalable efficiency, optimized energy and lowered prices with out relying solely on conventional approaches, the place additional advances have been gradual in coming and are rising costlier.
Baya delivers modular options designed to adapt to altering wants and benefit from these advantages for next-gen designs for AI, automotive and knowledge middle infrastructure—whereas additionally complying with rising requirements like Extremely Accelerator Hyperlink (UALink) die-to-die interconnect for additional accelerated AI scaling.
“Generative AI and multimodal compute have clearly shown that the real challenge has transitioned from compute engines to data movement and connectivity to truly deliver on the performance and efficiency needs of AI acceleration and scale compute infrastructure and communications,” stated Andrew Homan, managing director at Maverick Silicon, in an announcement. “The team at Baya Systems is uniquely positioned to fill this critical gap in the industry with its WeaverPro, WeaveIP and other solutions.”
To raised help AI and different compute-heavy and data-intensive purposes, Baya presents a holistic method to design, analyze and construct complicated, extremely performant multi-die methods that overcome conventional semiconductors’ bottlenecks of knowledge motion and scalability.
Baya’s foundational WeaverPro software program allows steady refinement of data-driven structure and micro-architecture improvement from preliminary specification via post-silicon tuning, with built-in simulation and workload evaluation that ensures the design delivers on KPIs.
The excellent WeaveIP superior system IP portfolio, with its distinctive transport, helps customized and commonplace protocols, maximizes efficiency and throughput whereas minimizing latency, silicon footprint and energy, quickly delivering complicated options.
“Baya Systems has executed ahead of schedule on building the team, the technology and the products that deliver on its vision to solve the high-performance system design challenge for the semiconductor industry,” stated Stan Reiss, basic companion at Matrix Companions, in an announcement. “This has uncovered a much larger scope for the company, and in our view, this new infusion of capital is necessary to extend leadership and capitalize on that opportunity.”
With a high-power group of entrepreneurial leaders and engineers from corporations like Apple, AMD, Arm, Intel, Qualcomm, and legendary microprocessor architect Jim Keller as chairman, Baya has quickly emerged out of stealth, delivered its flagship product to market and is now positioned to develop its market share.
“Designing increasingly complex combinations of CPUs, GPUs, neural network accelerators and other processors is a brute-force solution that the industry cannot rely on forever. It simply comes with too many risks: high re-engineering costs, difficulty scaling and potentially hitting the market with sub-par metrics,” stated Sailesh Kumar, founder and CEO, Baya Programs. “Baya’s performance-focused, software-based approach, coupled with our unique transport and modular fabric IP, is designed from the ground up to produce complex multi-die solutions that are correct by construction with a simplified design process.”
Early Baya prospects and companions embrace Tenstorrent, which has licensed Baya know-how for its AI and RISC-V chiplet options, and a few but to be introduced partnerships, signaling Baya’s rising traction and international attain.
Baya Programs’ tech is chiplet prepared, that means it may be constructed right into a system the place a bunch of chips sit atop a silicon substrate in an answer that maximize processing energy, vitality effectivity and networking pace.
The corporate stated it has grown in a focused, considered manner. 9 months after inception, Baya accomplished its first license and product supply. Baya’s progress accelerated after it emerged from stealth: the corporate secured a number of prospects and partnerships.
The corporate is near 50 workers, and its purpose is to quadruple bookings and income by the tip of 2025.
As for the inspiration, Baya Programs began with a imaginative and prescient to allow semiconductor system design to effectively transition to the chiplet period and match the exponentially growing calls for of clever compute (the tight integration of various compute parts corresponding to CPUs, GPUs and accelerators that allow the varied computational necessities of AI).
Origins
The cofounders — Sailesh Kumar, Eric Norige and Joji Philip — beforehand labored collectively at NetSpeed and later at Intel following its acquisition. At Intel, they significantly centered on the Xeon household of processors, making a SoC builder and different instruments to handle then-present challenges of scaling computational capabilities.
Baya Programs was integrated in March 2023 and got here out of stealth in June 2024. Baya is headquartered in Santa Clara, California.
With their distinctive perspective, they acknowledged that communication bandwidth between compute, reminiscence, and enter/output (IO) was turning into a crucial bottleneck to the development of AI and different data-intensive compute capabilities, one which present system architectures couldn’t successfully handle.
Including Nandan Nayampally as our CCO allowed the corporate to assume larger. Nayampally’s background at Arm concerned helped drive the management of Arm’s iconic Cortex CPU product line past the standard cell phone, client, and microcontroller worlds. However he additionally championed Arm’s coherent interconnect product traces, which are actually the muse for the information middle and automotive companies. Just like the founding group, he clearly noticed the necessity for the rising AI scale needing specialised excessive efficiency options.
Fashionable architectures require massively parallel and high-bandwidth knowledge motion, in addition to low-latency coherent communication inside massive CPU clusters. The Baya Programs group is decided to allow seamless and environment friendly communication inside computing methods to unlock their full potential, the corporate stated.
The corporate has a legendary chip design govt as its chairman in Keller. He’s technologist with imaginative and prescient, and he shares the assumption that the muse of scale for the AI period isn’t just about specialised compute parts, but additionally taking a big-picture view of any given system and enabling hyper-efficient knowledge motion. The cofounders initially met Jim throughout their overlapping time at Intel. Keller additionally performed pivotal roles in corporations corresponding to Apple, Tesla, AMD and quite a lot of chip startups.
A cellphone name between Keller, Tanuja Rao and Kumar set every thing in movement. Keller shared his unwavering perception within the distinctive skillset of the core group as uniquely able to fixing this large drawback. Inside a brief span, the agency managed to safe funding, construct a world-class group, purchase our first buyer, and ship a high-performance and distinctive resolution.
“[Keller’s] keen eye for innovation and understanding of market developments have been and will continue to be crucial to us as a company,” the corporate stated.
As for competitors, Arteris is the present incumbent within the pure-play on-chip SoC material area, and corporations like Arm and a few EDA distributors have merchandise which compete with elements of Baya’s portfolio.
Nonetheless, Baya Programs has a singular deal with constructing chiplet-ready material from the bottom up that unifies transactions from totally different protocols over the identical transport. Baya’s options complement Arm and EDA vendor choices in addition to present EDA software flows.
A number of the massive semiconductor leaders have constructed applied sciences in-house which can be just like our material platform, however these applied sciences are personalized to their system architectures and aren’t productized for broader market use. Baya view these corporations as potential companions, not rivals, as a result of the Baya platform presents a cheaper, quicker time-to-market resolution suited to numerous customized or ASIC tasks.
The corporate seeks to companion with organizations that share its philosophy of breaking down the obstacles to growing progressive, extremely scalable and dependable SoC and chiplet methods. Present companions embrace Tenstorrent, Intel, Blue Cheetah, the Open Compute Challenge and UCle (Common Chiplet Interconnect Specific), and the agency actively contributes to and take part of their ecosystems.
In the identical vein, Baya can also be rising its personal ecosystem with companions like processor distributors for CPUs, GPUs and NPUs; EDA corporations; DHD and PHY distributors; and foundries and design service homes, all of whom can profit from Baya’s portfolio.
