Bryon Moyer

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Bryon Moyer is a technology editor at Semiconductor Engineering.

Author's Latest Posts

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

Are FPGAs More Secure Than Processors?
By Bryon Moyer - 08 Oct, 2020 - Comments: 0

Security concerns often focus on software being executed on processors. But not all electronic functionality runs in software. FPGAs provide another way to do work, and they can be more secure than functions executed in software. FPGAs provide more control of hardware and are more opaque to attackers. In the case of embedded FPGAs, the designer is in complete control of the entire system. Th... » read more

Compiling And Optimizing Neural Nets
By Bryon Moyer - 10 Sep, 2020 - Comments: 0

Edge inference engines often run a slimmed-down real-time engine that interprets a neural-network model, invoking kernels as it goes. But higher performance can be achieved by pre-compiling the model and running it directly, with no interpretation — as long as the use case permits it. At compile time, optimizations are possible that wouldn’t be available if interpreting. By quantizing au... » read more

Better Inspection, Higher Yield
By Bryon Moyer - 08 Sep, 2020 - Comments: 0

Wafers can be inspected for large, obvious defects, or for small, subtle ones. The former is referred to as macro-inspection, while the latter is micro-inspection. These processes use different machines with different capital and operating costs, and they might look like competing approaches with different economic returns. In fact, they are complementary tactics that can be balanced within an ... » read more

Software-Defined Vehicles
By Bryon Moyer - 03 Sep, 2020 - Comments: 1

Automobiles long ago stopped being purely mechanical systems. But as more components are electrified — and, in particular, as the drivetrain is electrified — cars are becoming software-defined vehicles. Some think of such cars as computers on wheels. But as these systems continue to evolve, adding in more assisted and semi-autonomous capabilities, that comparison is looking increasingly ... » read more

All-in-One Vs. Point Tools For Security
By Bryon Moyer - 03 Sep, 2020 - Comments: 0

Security remains an urgent concern for builders of any system that might tempt attackers, but designers find themselves faced with a bewildering array of security options. Some of those are point solutions for specific pieces of the security puzzle. Others bill themselves as all-in-one, where the whole puzzle filled in. Which approach is best depends on the resources you have available and y... » read more

Wireless Power Market Heats Up
By Bryon Moyer - 26 Aug, 2020 - Comments: 2

The wireless power market is in flux as established technologies meet newer approaches. Old standards battles have simmered somewhat, but competing messages remain. What the public ends up using will depend heavily on public charging infrastructure, but the stakes are significant. The market for battery chargers is forecast to reach $25B by 2022. Most of those chargers plug into the wall, bu... » read more

What Happened To Execute-in-Place?
By Bryon Moyer - 25 Aug, 2020 - Comments: 0

Executing code directly from non-volatile memory, where it is stored, greatly simplifies compute architectures — especially for simple embedded devices like microcontrollers (MCUs). However, the divergence of memory and logic processes has made that nearly impossible today. The term “execute-in-place,” or ”XIP,” originated with the embedded NOR memory in MCUs that made XIP viable. ... » read more

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