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Brian Bailey

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Brian Bailey is Technology Editor/EDA for Semiconductor Engineering.

Author's Latest Posts

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

Von Neumann Is Struggling
By Brian Bailey - 18 Jan, 2021 - Comments: 5

In an era dominated by machine learning, the von Neumann architecture is struggling to stay relevant. The world has changed from being control-centric to one that is data-centric, pushing processor architectures to evolve. Venture money is flooding into domain-specific architectures (DSA), but traditional processors also are evolving. For many markets, they continue to provide an effective s... » read more

Verification’s Inflection Point
By Brian Bailey - 14 Jan, 2021 - Comments: 0

Functional verification is nearing an inflection point, brought on by rising complexity and the many tentacles that are intermixing it with other disciplines. New abstractions or different ways to approach the problems are needed. Being a verification engineer is no longer enough, except for those whose concerns is block-level verification. Most of the time and effort spent in verification i... » read more

2020: A Turning Point In The Chip Industry
By Brian Bailey - 28 Dec, 2020 - Comments: 3

At the start of 2020, most of the industry was upbeat and sales forecasts for the year were good. Then the pandemic hit, and fear gripped most of the industry — but not for long. New markets emerged, demand increased, and the levels of innovation went far beyond what had been forecast. While hope is on the horizon that the virus will be contained during 2021, life will not return to the ol... » read more

The Crazy Evolution Of Earbuds
By Brian Bailey - 22 Dec, 2020 - Comments: 1

Good ideas have a way of continually evolving. Hindsight is wonderful. We can look back over past inventions and proclaim the ones that were successful to be obvious, and those that weren’t as being stupid or flawed. Many successful inventions started off being flawed, but through demand and perseverance, those flaws were eliminated. At the time, I am sure most people thought Da Vinci was ... » read more

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