category: What Were They Thinking

category: IoT, Security & Automotive

UCIe: Marketing Ruins It Again
By Brian Bailey - 24 Mar, 2022 - Comments: 1

You may have seen the press release and articles recently about a new standard called UCIe. It stands for Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express. The standard is a great idea and will certainly help the market for chiplet-based designs to advance. But the name — Argggh. More on that later. First, let's talk about what it is. You may notice the name looks similar to PCIe (Peripheral Compone... » read more

Does EDA Sell Fear?
By Brian Bailey - 24 Feb, 2022 - Comments: 3

I worked in the EDA industry for over 30 years and a common lament I heard was that the EDA industry survived by selling fear. Your new chip will fail if you do not buy the latest tool offering. There always seemed to be a natural dislike for the EDA industry and many users thought the industry overcharged and was unable to innovate. I never quite understood the reasoning. A recent comment, ... » read more

Ethical Coverage
By Brian Bailey - 27 Jan, 2022 - Comments: 1

How many times have you heard statements such as, "The verification task quadruples when the design size doubles?" The implication is that every register bit that is created has doubled the state space of the design. It gives the impression that complete verification is hopeless, and because of that little progress has been made in coming up with real coverage metrics. When constrained rando... » read more

The Past Predicting The Future
By Brian Bailey - 22 Dec, 2021 - Comments: 0

It is often said that you cannot predict the future by looking at the past, but that isn't always correct. There are many clues provided by digging into change. Those changes are a prelude to what may happen in the future. One way we can do that here at Semiconductor Engineering is by looking at changes in reading habits. What types of articles are attracting the most attention? This is a sure ... » read more

Structural Vs. Functional
By Brian Bailey - 23 Nov, 2021 - Comments: 0

When working on an article about PLM and semiconductors, I got to review a favorite topic from my days in EDA development – verification versus validation. I built extensive presentations around it and tried to persuade people within the EDA industry, as well as customers, about the advantages of doing a top-down functional modeling and analysis. The V diagram that everyone uses is flawed and... » read more

Dealing With Market Shifts
By Brian Bailey - 28 Oct, 2021 - Comments: 1

Back in the days when I was in EDA development, I was taken in by the words of Clayton Christensen when he published "The Innovators Dilemma." He successfully introduced the technology world to the ideas of disruptive innovation. One of the key takeaways was that you should always be working to make your own successful products redundant, or someone else will do it for you. One tool I worked... » read more

Wearables Disconnect
By Brian Bailey - 23 Sep, 2021 - Comments: 0

One of the great opportunities created by the pandemic is a result of conferences going online. I know many people miss the social aspects of not being able to get together with your thousand closest friends, who you see every year at the same shows, but requiring a physical presence is limiting in both time and expense. Personally, I have used the opportunity to "attend" conferences that I wou... » read more

Education Vs. Training
By Brian Bailey - 26 Aug, 2021 - Comments: 1

While writing my recent articles on the subject of training, a number of people pointed out that training and education are not the same thing. In a very simple sense, training is defined to be learning a skill or behavior that enables you to 'do' something, whereas education is the acquisition of knowledge from study or training. These definitions leave me cold and, in my mind, miss a very ... » read more

Rethink, Not Replicate
By Brian Bailey - 29 Jul, 2021 - Comments: 0

We should start to call COVID the Great Disrupter. It caused many things to change, ranging from how the industry has been tackling education, to supply chains, the ability to find products in stores, and the pricing and availability of materials, workers, and office space. I can't see anyone fully trusting just-in-time supply chains anymore, even though they sometimes provided financial advant... » read more

Pitching To Your Audience
By Brian Bailey - 24 Jun, 2021 - Comments: 2

One of the most time-consuming parts of being a journalist is listening to enough people to get all sides of a story. Writing the story is often the easy part. What makes listening more difficult is that there are detail people and concept people, but few that sit in the middle. Some people love to get down into the details about the latest feature they have just implemented in a tool, or wh... » read more

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