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Brian Bailey

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Brian Bailey is Technology Editor/EDA for Semiconductor Engineering.

Author's Latest Posts

The Race Toward Quantum Advantage
By Brian Bailey - 14 Sep, 2023 - Comments: 0

Quantum computing has yet to show an advantage over conventional computing, but huge sums of money are betting it will. So far that hasn't happened. Early quantum computers were created in the mid-1990s after mathematicians had demonstrated the effectiveness of applying quantum approaches to some problems. At that stage they were simulated using conventional computing, but it started the rac... » read more

New Concepts Required For Security Verification
By Brian Bailey - 28 Aug, 2023 - Comments: 0

Verification for security requires new practices in both the development and verification flows, but tools and methodologies to enable this are rudimentary today. Flows are becoming more complex, especially when they span multiple development groups. Security is special in that it is pervasive throughout the development process, requiring both positive and negative verification. Positive ver... » read more

Predicting The Future For Semiconductors
By Brian Bailey - 24 Aug, 2023 - Comments: 1

Is it possible to predict the future? Of course not. We all make projections of what happened in the past, where they are now, and the implications for the future. We bias that in various ways and think we are making some astounding revelation, which is highly unlikely to become true. Of course, by luck, some people get it right and they are bestowed with grand accolades and awards. The likelih... » read more

Optimizing IC Designs For Real-World Use Cases
By Brian Bailey - 24 Aug, 2023 - Comments: 0

Semiconductor systems are becoming more focused on power, performance, and area for the primary scenarios they are likely to see in real-world applications, but increasingly at the expense of secondary tasks. This is happening at all levels of abstraction and all stages of the design flow. At the highest level, processors are being optimized to run a given set of software. RISC-V is one of t... » read more

Why It’s So Difficult To Ensure System Safety Over Time
By Brian Bailey - 14 Aug, 2023 - Comments: 0

Safety is emerging as a concern across an increasing number of industries, but standards and methodologies are not in place to ensure electronic systems attain a defined level of safety over time. Much of this falls on the shoulders of the chip industry, which provides the underlying technology, and it raises questions about what more can be done to improve safety. A crude taxonomy recently ... » read more

Specialization Vs. Generalization In Processors
By Brian Bailey - 10 Aug, 2023 - Comments: 1

Academia has been looking at specialization for many years, but solutions were rejected because general-purpose solutions were advancing fast enough to keep up with most application requirements. That is no longer the case. The introduction and support of the RISC-V processor architecture has attracted a lot of attention, but whether that is the right direction for the majority of modern comput... » read more

Are In-Person Conferences Sustainable?
By Brian Bailey - 27 Jul, 2023 - Comments: 2

DAC/Semicon are now over, and while I missed a large part of it due to a stomach bug, I increasingly have a stale taste in my mouth about in-person conferences in general. Let's split things up – an event such as DAC is both an academic conference and a trade show. It has been that way almost since its inception 60 years ago. There are many other conferences that are pure conferences, and the... » read more

Shift Left, Extend Right, Stretch Sideways
By Brian Bailey - 27 Jul, 2023 - Comments: 0

The EDA industry has been talking about shift left for a few years, but development flows are now being stretched in two additional ways, extending right to include silicon lifecycle management, and sideways to include safety and security. In addition, safety and security join verification and power as being vertical concerns, and we are increasingly seeing interlinking within those concerns. ... » read more

Getting Rid Of Heat In Chips
By Brian Bailey - 20 Jul, 2023 - Comments: 1

Power consumed by semiconductors creates heat, which must be removed from the device, but how to do this efficiently is a growing challenge. Heat is the waste product of semiconductors. It is produced when power is dissipated in devices and along wires. Power is consumed when devices switch, meaning that it is dependent upon activity, and that power is constantly being wasted by imperfect de... » read more

Not All There: Heterogeneous Multiprocessor Design Tools
By Brian Bailey - 26 Jun, 2023 - Comments: 0

The design, implementation, and programming of multicore heterogeneous systems is becoming more common, often driven by the software workloads, but the tooling to help optimize the processors, interconnect, and memory are disjointed. Over the past few years, many tools have emerged that help with the definition and implementation of a single processor, optimized for a given set of software. ... » read more

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