Bryon Moyer

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Bryon Moyer is a technology editor at Semiconductor Engineering. He has been involved in the electronics industry for more than 35 years. The first 25 were as an engineer and marketer at all levels of management, working for MMI, AMD, Cypress, Altera, Actel, Teja Technologies, and Vector Fabrics. His industry focus was on PLDs/FPGAs, EDA, multicore processing, networking, and software analysis. He has been an editor and freelance ghostwriter for more than 12 years, having previously written for EE Journal. His editorial coverage has included AI, security, MEMS and sensors, IoT, and semiconductor processing to his portfolio. His technical interests are broad, and he finds particular satisfaction in drawing useful parallels between seemingly unrelated fields. He has a BSEE from UC Berkeley and an MSEE from Santa Clara University. Away from work, Bryon enjoys music, photography, travel, cooking, hiking, and languages.

Author's Latest Posts

CXL and OMI: Competing or Complementary?
By Bryon Moyer - 23 Mar, 2022 - Comments: 1

System designers are looking at any ideas they can find to increase memory bandwidth and capacity, focusing on everything from improvements in memory to new types of memory. But higher-level architectural changes can help to fulfill both needs, even as memory types are abstracted away from CPUs. Two new protocols are helping to make this possible, CXL and OMI. But there is a looming question... » read more

Software-Driven and System-Level Tests Drive Chip Quality
By Bryon Moyer - 08 Mar, 2022 - Comments: 0

Traditional semiconductor testing typically involves tests executed by automatic test equipment (ATE). But engineers are beginning to favor an additional late-test pass that tests systems-on-chip (SoCs) in a system context in order to catch design issues prior to end-product assembly. “System-level test (SLT) gives a high-volume environment where you can test the hardware and software toge... » read more

Verifying Side-Channel Security Pre-Silicon
By Bryon Moyer - 03 Mar, 2022 - Comments: 1

As security grows in importance, side-channel attacks pose a unique challenge because they rely on physical phenomena that aren’t always modeled for the design verification process. While everything can be hacked, the goal is to make it so difficult that an attacker concludes it isn't worth the effort. For side-channel attacks, the pre-silicon design is the best place to address any known ... » read more

Machine Learning Showing Up As Silicon IP
By Bryon Moyer - 03 Mar, 2022 - Comments: 0

New machine-learning (ML) architectures continue to appear. Up to now, each new offering has been implemented in a chip for sale, to be placed alongside host processors, memory, and other chips on an accelerator board. But over time, more of this technology could be sold as IP that can be integrated into a system-on-chip (SoC). That trend is evident at recent conferences, where an increasing... » read more

Why Data Center Power Will Never Come Down
By Bryon Moyer - 10 Feb, 2022 - Comments: 3

Data centers have become significant consumers of energy. In order to deal with the proliferation of data centers and the servers within them, there is a big push to reduce the energy consumption of all data center components. With all that effort, will data center power really come down? The answer is no, despite huge improvements in energy efficiency. “Keeping data center power consum... » read more

What Causes Semiconductor Aging?
By Bryon Moyer - 08 Feb, 2022 - Comments: 7

Semiconductor technology has evolved to the point where no one can assume chips will last forever. If not carefully considered, aging can shorten the life of an IC below the needs for an intended application. Aging is well studied in technology circles, but while others less directly involved may understand at a general level this is a problem, it's not always obvious why. So what exactly ar... » read more

ML Focus Shifting Toward Software
By Bryon Moyer - 03 Feb, 2022 - Comments: 1

New machine-learning (ML) architectures continue to garner a huge amount of attention as the race continues to provide the most effective acceleration architectures for the cloud and the edge, but attention is starting to shift from the hardware to the software tools. The big question now is whether a software abstraction eventually will win out over hardware details in determining who the f... » read more

Will Steering Wheels Ever Disappear?
By Bryon Moyer - 19 Jan, 2022 - Comments: 3

Autonomous vehicles are touted as the way of the future, and the general assumption is ultimately everything will be autonomous. But there are broad segments of the market where autonomy is unlikely to happen. There is no question that autonomy is possible. In fact, within certain bounds it's already here. Robo-taxis are available in some cities. Mercedes, Tesla, and Lexus are all touting so... » read more

SOT-MRAM To Challenge SRAM
By Bryon Moyer - 13 Jan, 2022 - Comments: 1

In an era of new non-volatile memory (NVM) technologies, yet another variation is poised to join the competition — a new version of MRAM called spin-orbit torque, or SOT-MRAM. What makes this one particularly interesting is the possibility that someday it could supplant SRAM arrays in systems-on-chip (SoCs) and other integrated circuits. The key advantages of SOT-MRAM technology are the pr... » read more

Preventing Failures Before They Occur
By Bryon Moyer - 11 Jan, 2022 - Comments: 1

A decade or so ago, when MEMS sensors were in the limelight, one of the touted applications was to install them on industrial or other equipment to get an advance warning if the equipment was approaching failure. Today, in-circuit monitoring brings the same promise. Are these competing technologies? Or can they be made to work together? “Almost all advanced tool manufacturing companies ... » read more

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