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

How Will Future Cars Interact With Humans?
By Bryon Moyer - 03 Dec, 2020 - Comments: 0

Future automobiles may come with a set of controls very different from what we’re used to now. Mechanical knobs and switches already are being replaced by touchscreens, but that's just the beginning. There are a multitude of other possible ways in which drivers can interact with their vehicles, and the list is growing as technology drives down the cost of this new human-machine interface (... » read more

Blockchain Attempts To Secure The Supply Chain
By Bryon Moyer - 03 Dec, 2020 - Comments: 0

Blockchain technology is starting to be deployed more widely In the battle against counterfeiting, often coupled with component IDs to allow device authentication. Securing the supply chain is a complex challenge, particularly as more IP from more vendors in more locations makes its way into chips, packages or even systems. Being able to attest to the history of the device to prove its prove... » read more

MPU Vs. MCU
By Bryon Moyer - 01 Dec, 2020 - Comments: 1

There was a time when microprocessors and microcontrollers were distinct devices. There was never a question as to which one you were dealing with. But changes in the memory architecture have muddied the distinction in modern devices. There are a number of ways in which microprocessors and microcontrollers could possibly be differentiated. But there is no universal agreement as to how that s... » read more

Uniquely Identifying PCBs, Subassemblies, And Packaging
By Bryon Moyer - 18 Nov, 2020 - Comments: 0

Securing the semiconductor supply chain is becoming much more difficult as devices increasingly are disaggregated, a shift being forced on the industry due to the rising cost of scaling and the need for more customization and faster time to market. Individual component IDs are an important starting point for supply chain trust, but they are no longer sufficient. Those components will end up ... » read more

Dealing With Sub-Threshold Variation
By Bryon Moyer - 12 Nov, 2020 - Comments: 0

Chipmakers are pushing into sub-threshold operation in an effort to prolong battery life and reduce energy costs, adding a whole new set of challenges for design teams. While process and environmental variation long have been concerns for advanced silicon process nodes, most designs operate in the standard “super-threshold” regime. Sub-threshold designs, in contrast, have unique variatio... » read more

Does HW Vs. SW Choice Affect Quality And Reliability?
By Bryon Moyer - 10 Nov, 2020 - Comments: 0

Electronic systems comprise both hardware and software. Which functions are implemented with hardware and which with software are decisions made based upon a wide variety of considerations, including concerns about quality and reliability. Hardware may intrinsically provide for higher device quality, but it is also the source of reliability concerns. This is in contrast with popular views of... » read more

New And Innovative Supply Chain Threats Emerging
By Bryon Moyer - 05 Nov, 2020 - Comments: 1

The electronics supply chain is seeing evidence of increased sophistication in the counterfeiting of complex ICs and simple passives, both of which can impact the functioning and safety of the systems that use them. New technologies are being developed to build trust by helping to identify counterfeit devices before assembly and during failure analysis. It's too early to tell how effective t... » read more

Are Today’s MEMS Gyros “Good Enough”?
By Bryon Moyer - 28 Oct, 2020 - Comments: 1

The gyroscope market is heating up, fueled by increasingly autonomous vehicles, robots, and industrial equipment, all of which are demanding greater precision and ever-smaller devices. Gyroscopes historically have been a staple in navigation for years. However, classic designs are macro-mechanical, and high-performance units can be very expensive. For lower-performance applications, micro-el... » read more

Slower Metal Bogs Down SoC Performance
By Bryon Moyer - 15 Oct, 2020 - Comments: 0

Metal interconnect delays are rising, offsetting some of the gains from faster transistors at each successive process node. Older architectures were born in a time when compute time was the limiter. But with interconnects increasingly viewed as the limiter on advanced nodes, there’s an opportunity to rethink how we build systems-on-chips (SoCs). ”Interconnect delay is a fundamental tr... » read more

Scramble For The White Space
By Bryon Moyer - 13 Oct, 2020 - Comments: 0

Chipmakers are pushing to utilize more of the unused portion of a design for different functions, reducing margin in the rest of the chip to more clearly define that white space. White space typically is used to relieve back-end routing congestion before all of the silicon area is used up. But a significant amount of space still remain unused. That provides an opportunity for inserting monit... » read more

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