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Brian Bailey

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Brian Bailey is Technology Editor/EDA for Semiconductor Engineering.

Author's Latest Posts

Designing 2.5D Systems
By Brian Bailey - 15 Mar, 2021 - Comments: 0

As more designs hit the reticle limit, or suffer from decreasing yield, migrating to 2.5D designs may provide a path forward. But this kind of advanced packaging also comes with some additional challenges. How you adapt and change your design team may be determined by where your focus has been in the past, or what you are trying to achieve. There are business, organizational, and technical c... » read more

Domain-Specific Memory
By Brian Bailey - 11 Mar, 2021 - Comments: 2

Domain-specific computing may be all the rage, but it is avoiding the real problem. The bigger concern is the memories that throttle processor performance, consume more power, and take up the most chip area. Memories need to break free from the rigid structures preferred by existing software. When algorithms and memory are designed together, improvements in performance are significant and pr... » read more

Chiplets For The Masses
By Brian Bailey - 03 Mar, 2021 - Comments: 2

Chiplets are a compelling technology, but so far they are available only to a select few players in the industry. That's changing, and the industry has taken little steps to get there, but timing for when you will be able to buy a chiplet to integrate into your system remains uncertain. While new fabrication nodes continue to be developed, scaling is coming to an end, be it for physical or e... » read more

The Single Greatest Opportunity For Open Source
By Brian Bailey - 25 Feb, 2021 - Comments: 7

Next week, I will be moderating a panel at the virtual DVCon on the subject of open-source verification. I thought it would be good to advertise the event on LinkedIn to see if anyone wanted to send me well-structured questions for the panelists. What happened surprised me a little because the discussions almost exclusively went to the need for open-source verification tools. In my opinion, the... » read more

Firmware Skills Shortage
By Brian Bailey - 25 Feb, 2021 - Comments: 0

Good hardware without good software is a waste of silicon, but with so many new processors and accelerator architectures being created, and so many new skills required, companies are finding it hard to hire enough engineers with low-level software expertise to satisfy the demand. Writing compilers, mappers and optimization software does not have the same level of pizazz as developing new AI ... » read more

Design For Reliability
By Brian Bailey - 15 Feb, 2021 - Comments: 1

Circuit aging is emerging as a mandatory design concern across a swath of end markets, particularly in markets where advanced-node chips are expected to last for more than a few years. Some chipmakers view this as a competitive opportunity, but others are unsure we fully understand how those devices will age. Aging is the latest in a long list of issues being pushed further left in the desig... » read more

The Problem With Benchmarks
By Brian Bailey - 11 Feb, 2021 - Comments: 1

Benchmarks long have been used to compare products, but what makes a good benchmark and who should be trusted with their creation? The answer to those questions is more difficult than it may appear on the surface, and some benchmarks are being used in surprising ways. Everyone loves a simple, clear benchmark, but that is only possible when the selection criteria are equally simple. Unfortuna... » read more

Von Neumann Upset
By Brian Bailey - 28 Jan, 2021 - Comments: 0

My recent article about the von Neumann architecture received some quite passionate responses, including one that thought I was attempting to slight the person. That was most certainly not the intent, given that the invention enabled a period of very rapid advancement in computers and technology in general. The process of invention and engineering are both quite similar and yet different. In... » read more

Roaring ’20s For The Chip Industry
By Brian Bailey - 28 Jan, 2021 - Comments: 0

2020 was a good year for the semiconductor industry and the EDA industry that fuels it, but 2021 has the opportunity to be even better. New end application markets continue to open, and what were once seen as technical hurdles are leading to a multitude of innovative solutions, all of which need suitable tooling. No company can afford to invest everywhere, and so for EDA companies, their rel... » read more

Taming Non-Predictable Systems
By Brian Bailey - 28 Jan, 2021 - Comments: 0

How predictable are semiconductor systems? The industry aims to create predictable systems and yet when a carrot is dangled, offering the possibility of faster, cheaper, or some other gain, decision makers invariably decide that some degree of uncertainty is warranted. Understanding uncertainty is at least the first step to making informed decisions, but new tooling is required to assess the im... » read more

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