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Brian Bailey

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Brian Bailey is Technology Editor/EDA for Semiconductor Engineering.

Author's Latest Posts

Is There Any Hope For Asynchronous Design?
By Brian Bailey - 25 Apr, 2024 - Comments: 6

In an era when power has become a fundamental design constraint, questions persist about whether asynchronous logic has a role to play. It is a design style said to have significant benefits and yet has never resulted in more than a few experiments. Synchronous design utilizes a clock, where the clock frequency is set by the longest and slowest path in the design. That includes potential var... » read more

Revitalizing DAC
By Brian Bailey - 25 Apr, 2024 - Comments: 0

The 61st Design Automation Conference is just two months away and as I get closer to retirement, I know there will only be a few remaining for me. I entered the EDA industry in 1980, so have been involved with it for almost 45 years. Over that period, I have only missed a few. It is interesting how the conference has changed over the years. In the early days, DAC was only a conference, where... » read more

Memory On Logic: The Good And Bad
By Brian Bailey - 11 Apr, 2024 - Comments: 0

The chip industry is progressing rapidly toward 3D-ICs, but a simpler step has been shown to provide gains equivalent to a whole node advancement — extracting distributed memories and placing them on top of logic. Memory on logic significantly reduces the distance between logic and directly associated memory. This can increase performance by 22% and reduce power by 36%, according to one re... » read more

NoCs In 3D Space
By Brian Bailey - 03 Apr, 2024 - Comments: 0

A network on chip (NoC) has become an essential piece of technology that enables the complexity of chips to keep growing, but when designs go 3D, or when third-party chiplets become pervasive, it's not clear how NoCs will evolve or what the impact will be on chiplet architectures. A NoC enables data to move between heterogeneous computing elements, while at the same time minimizing the resou... » read more

Career Transitions
By Brian Bailey - 28 Mar, 2024 - Comments: 0

Many people change their career path, sometimes to take on new challenges, sometimes following opportunity or money. As we learn, we develop both expertise and skill sets and in many cases expertise in one area has diminished value in another, meaning that it becomes more difficult to switch as we get older. But there are times when both knowledge and skills can be fully transferred, making the... » read more

What’s Missing In 2.5D EDA Tools
By Brian Bailey - 28 Mar, 2024 - Comments: 0

Gaps in EDA tool chains for 2.5D designs are limiting the adoption of this advanced packaging approach, which so far has been largely confined to high-performance computing. But as the rest of the chip industry begins migrating toward advanced packaging and chiplets, the EDA industry is starting to change direction. There are learning periods with all new technologies, and 2.5D advanced pack... » read more

Optimizing Energy At The System Level
By Brian Bailey - 18 Mar, 2024 - Comments: 0

Power is a ubiquitous concern, and it is impossible to optimize a system's energy consumption without considering the system as a whole. Tremendous strides have been made in the optimization of a hardware implementation, but that is no longer enough. The complete system must be optimized. There are far reaching implications to this, some of which are driving the path toward domain-specific c... » read more

Design Tool Think Tank Required
By Brian Bailey - 29 Feb, 2024 - Comments: 1

When I was in the EDA industry as a technologist, there were three main parts to my role. The first was to tell customers about new technologies being developed and tool extensions that would be appearing in the next release. These were features they might find beneficial both in the projects they were undertaking today, and even more so, would apply to future projects. Second, I would try and ... » read more

2.5D Integration: Big Chip Or Small PCB?
By Brian Bailey - 29 Feb, 2024 - Comments: 1

Defining whether a 2.5D device is a printed circuit board shrunk down to fit into a package, or is a chip that extends beyond the limits of a single die, may seem like hair-splitting semantics, but it can have significant consequences for the overall success of a design. Planar chips always have been limited by size of the reticle, which is about 858mm2. Beyond that, yield issues make the si... » read more

Accellera Preps New Standard For Clock-Domain Crossing
By Brian Bailey - 29 Feb, 2024 - Comments: 0

Part of the hierarchical development flow is about to get a lot simpler, thanks to a new standard being created by Accellera. What is less clear is how long will it take before users see any benefit. At the register transfer level (RTL), when a data signal passes between two flip flops, it initially is assumed that clocks are perfect. After clock-tree synthesis and place-and-route are perfor... » read more

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