Semiconductor company Openchip plans to license Baya’s data-movement platform and Network-on-Chip (NoC) technology.

The partnership is expected to boost Baya’s footprint in Europe, following the opening of its UK offices in Cambridge earlier this year.

Baya Systems, which specializes in software-driven, chiplet-ready semiconductor fabric IP, will allow Openchip to use its WeaveIP unified fabric to develop specialized intelligent compute systems.

Baya’s WeaverPro FabricStudio platform is poised to help Openchip rapidly design and optimize the development of complex RISC-V-based multi-chiplet systems to ensure overall system efficiency, performance, and scale.

By using Baya’s software-driven platform to model and validate data movement architecture before committing to physical silicon, Openchip promises to reduce development risk, cut time-to-market, and optimize power-performance-area (PPA) at scale.

Sailesh Kumar, CEO and founder of Baya Systems, said: “The fundamental challenges facing AI hardware today – scalability, thermal efficiency, and uncompromized performance – cannot be solved if interconnect is treated as an afterthought, the communication layer between memory and compute is the critical connective tissue of the AI stack.

“Our collaboration with Openchip enables them to address data movement explicitly and early to build their state-of-art systems with the performance and efficiency the market now demands within the ever-shrinking time-to-market window.”

Baya warned that next-generation AI and high-performance computing (HPC) workloads are throttled by raw compute and data movement. To break through the “memory wall,” the company said that hardware architects must design, simulate, and optimize their compute systems with specialized elements and optimize data movement with interconnect fabrics and protocols much earlier in the design cycle.

“Innovation in the modern semiconductor landscape requires tight collaboration between leading-edge IP and system architecture,” Cesc Guim, CEO of Openchip, said.

“Baya’s data-movement platform provides the architectural foundation we need to deliver scalable, next-generation computing platforms. We welcome Baya’s expanding presence in Europe and look forward to driving the future of RISC-V innovation together.”

Following its first UK office opening, Baya is currently evaluating sites for its first EU-based office to support its growing European customer base.

Openchip also continues its scale-up from its Barcelona headquarters, with an operational presence across six European countries: Spain, Italy, Poland, France, Germany, and Ireland.

Once chiplet startup Baya emerged from stealth in June 2024, it secured a $36m Series B funding round.

The raise was led by Maverick Silicon and backed by a strategic investment from Synopsys. It also saw participation from previous investors, including Matrix Partners and Intel Capital.

In November last year, Openchip and Japan’s NEC announced they were moving forward with plans to co-develop new vector processing unit (VPU) cards based on the open RISC-V architecture to run inside of Aurora, NEC’s HPC system that features a hybrid scalar-vector design.

The Barcelona startup, which received €111 million ($129m) from the European Union’s Next Generation Funds, is developing a System on a Chip (SoC) that uses multiple chiplets and features an open interconnection, dubbed Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express (UCIe). The company also aims to develop reference designs for hardware platforms, as well as baseline software development kits and application services.