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Brian Bailey

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Brian Bailey is Technology Editor/EDA for Semiconductor Engineering.

Author's Latest Posts

Reactionary Or Anticipatory?
By Brian Bailey - 21 Oct, 2024 - Comments: 0

The EDA industry is located at an interesting place, where anticipation and reaction come together. Too much of either one is wasteful, but too little leaves the industry having to deal with unwanted problems. We see this happening in several areas today, and the balance is changing for several reasons. We normally expect universities to be 100% anticipatory. There is no point in them worki... » read more

How Big A Deal Is Aging?
By Brian Bailey - 17 Oct, 2024 - Comments: 0

Nothing lasts forever, but in the semiconductor world things used to last long enough to become obsolete long before their end of life. That's no longer the case with newer nodes, and it is raising concerns in safety-critical markets such as automotive. Being able to fully understand what happens inside of chips is still a work in progress, and analysis approaches are trying to keep up. Unti... » read more

Barriers To Chiplet Sockets
By Brian Bailey - 30 Sep, 2024 - Comments: 0

Experts At The Table: Demand for chiplets is growing, but debate continues about whether standards and general-purpose chiplets will kick-start the commercialization boom, or whether success will come through customization of those chiplets. Semiconductor Engineeering sat down to discuss these and other related issues with Elad Alon, CEO of Blue Cheetah; Mark Kuemerle, vice president of technol... » read more

Pressure Builds To Adopt Virtual Prototypes
By Brian Bailey - 26 Sep, 2024 - Comments: 0

Virtual prototypes, often used as a niche tool in the past, are becoming essential for developing complex systems. In fact, systems companies are finding they no longer can function without them. In the semiconductor industry, a virtual prototype is a model for a system at an abstraction level above RTL. But there is no such thing as 'the' virtual prototype. They are constructed for a partic... » read more

What Comes After HBM For Chiplets
By Brian Bailey - 18 Sep, 2024 - Comments: 0

Experts At The Table: Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss what will trigger the creation of a commercial chiplet marketplace, and what those chiplet-based designs will look like, with Elad Alon, CEO of Blue Cheetah; Mark Kuemerle, vice president of technology at Marvell; Kevin Yee, senior director of IP and ecosystem marketing at Samsung; Sailesh Kumar, CEO of Baya Systems; and Tanuja... » read more

Is PPA Relevant Today?
By Brian Bailey - 12 Sep, 2024 - Comments: 0

The optimization of power, performance, and area (PPA) has been at the core of chip design since the dawn of EDA, but these metrics are becoming less valuable without the context of how and where these chips will be used. Unlike in the past, however, that context now comes from factors outside of hardware development. And while PPA still serves as a useful proxy for many parts of the hardwar... » read more

A New Generation Of 7400 Socket
By Brian Bailey - 29 Aug, 2024 - Comments: 0

When I was 18, and just been accepted at Brunel University in West London to start my undergraduate degree in electrical and electronic engineering, I sent off a letter to Texas Instruments telling them about the journey ahead of me and asked if they could they send me a copy of their TTL Data Book. A few weeks later a package arrived and there it was. This incredible brown/orange book, thicker... » read more

Defining The Chiplet Socket
By Brian Bailey - 29 Aug, 2024 - Comments: 0

Experts At The Table: The semiconductor industry has been buzzing with the possibilities surrounding chiplets, but so far this packaging technology has been confined to large semiconductor companies that are vertically integrated. The industry has been attempting to open this up to a broader group of people. To work out what this means for chiplets, and what standardization will be required, Se... » read more

Reusable Power Models
By Brian Bailey - 14 Aug, 2024 - Comments: 0

Power is not a new concern, and proprietary models are available for some tasks, but the industry lacks standardization. The Silicon Integration Initiative (Si2) is hoping to help resolve that with an upcoming release of IEEE 2416, based on its Unified Power Model (UPM) work. The creation of any model is not to be taken lightly. There is a cost to its creation, verification and maintenance. ... » read more

Capturing Knowledge Within LLMs
By Brian Bailey - 25 Jul, 2024 - Comments: 0

At DAC this year, there was a lot of talk about AI and the impact it is likely to have. While EDA companies have been using it for optimization and improving iteration loops within the flow, the end users have been concentrating on how to use it to improve the user interface between engineers and tools. The feedback is very positive. Large language models (LLMs) have been trained on a huge a... » read more

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