Embedded Executive Podcast

Many of the memory suppliers choose a niche to be an expert. It may be automotive, consumer, industrial, medical, etc. In the case of Apacer Technology, the company has chosen to do it all. In my discussion with Gibson Chen, the General Manager of Apacer, I challenged whether that’s the best approach, trying to serve just about any market. Listen to this week’s Embedded Executives podcast and decide for yourself if that’s the right strategy.

The latest wearable medical devices are designed to help consumers make better decisions regarding their care. Until recently, the space has been somewhat limited. Size and power were the two biggest constraints. Those constraints aren’t going away, but they are definitely being lessened thanks to some of the latest innovations on the semiconductor side.

To hear more about these innovations, I spoke to Andrew Baker, the Co-Founder and CEO of Orca Semiconductor, a startup in the emerging connected health arena. Check out this week’s Embedded Executives podcast to learn more.

If the software-defined vehicle (SDV) comes off as planned, life for consumers becomes a whole lot easier. “If” is the key word in that sentence, and there’s tons of debate as to when that might actually happen.

To understand what the SDV is—and it means different things to different people—I spoke to Suraj Gajendra, the Vice President of Automotive Products for Arm.

As the IP provider for many of the Tier 1 silicon providers in the automotive space, the company has a big say in what it’ll actually look like and when it’ll happen. Hear what Suraj had to say on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

Is Wi-Fi even a thing anymore? What I mean by that is, at least from the users’ perspective, Wi-Fi just works, and that’s not much to think about. However, behind the scenes, a lot has to happen to make that “ubiquitousness” happen. To get a better understanding of what is happening back there, I spoke to Sivaram Trikutam, the Vice President of Wi-Fi Products for Infineon. We get into the latest standards, including Matter, on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

Can batteries last for 40 years? And what is the application that would require such a timeline?

That’s the discussion I had with Sol Jacobs, the Vice President and General Manager of Tadiran Batteries.

The topic arose after the company’s recent whitepaper crossed my desk. To understand whether this was fact or simply a click-bait headline, I decided to go right to the source. Hear what Sol had to say on the matter in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

Why would you put sensors and power components into the same business unit if you’re a component supplier? That’s what I asked Adam White, President, of Infineon’s Power and Sensors Division.

After hearing his response, it made perfect sense—today’s sensors are quickly growing in number and power consumption. So it only makes sense to put those engineers in the same room. Adam explained it better than I could, citing lots of power numbers and energy requirements needed by various applications, and how they vary in different regions. Check out this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

Memory for automotive applications needs to be different from memory that’s intended for other applications. Why is that? I could not answer that question, so I turned to Michael Basca, the Vice President of Embedded Products and Systems within Micron’s Embedded Business Unit. As you might expect, Michael had no trouble answering the question. Hear what he had to say on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

Is it possible to develop a car that would never crash? We’re talking about a physical crash, not a software crash. According to Chet Babla, Indie Semiconductor’s Senior Vice President, it is. Being a non-believer, I had Chet as my guest on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast. Chet walked me through exactly what needs to happen to make this phenomenon a reality. Check it out.

Synopsys is all in on generative AI, and it’s putting its money where its mouth is by creating a Center for Generative AI within the company. Being that I had no idea what this meant, how it would work, or what it would mean to the industry, I invited the Center’s Executive Director, Stelios Diamantidis, to join me on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast. He laid out what the Center looks like today, and what it will mean to the entire industry going forward.

Understatement: Raspberry Pi is popular with the embedded community.

Myth: Raspberry Pi is not a secure platform.

I believed in that myth until a recent conversation with Alex Kaay, the CTO and co-founder of Zymbit. The beauty of the Pi is in its simplicity, but don’t equate simplicity with unsecure. Alex walked me through why people's beliefs are what they are, and more importantly, why those beliefs are misguided. Check out this week’s Embedded Executives podcast and see if you’re a believer.

One area of technology that many vendors and technologies are gunning for is smart metering, whether commercial or residential electric meters, water meters, or something else.

The number of potential meters is HUGE. But which technology makes the most sense for this application? As you might expect, it depends on who you talk to. For this podcast, I spoke to Phil Beecher, the President and CEO of the Wi-SUN Alliance. Phil explained why Wi-SUN makes the most sense in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

Medical wearables can greatly enhance the quality of life for many people. This can be done by instantly accessing medical information and potentially alerting a professional, or simply tracking stats on an individual.

According to Andrew Burt, the Director of Product Line Management of Digital Healthcare at Analog Devices, his company has produced a kit for developers who are coming up with ideas on how to pull in this data and then what to do with it. It’s pretty amazing what can be done, and it’s not nearly as hard as you might think. Check out this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

Correction: The ADI wearable device referred to in the podcast has received FDA 510(k) clearance, not FDA approval.

In this era of AI, designers have to think differently about every aspect of their projects. That includes the memory subsystem. To that end, Micron had a series of announcements to help facilitate AI, particularly on mobile devices. But beyond each subsystem, there’s just so much that needs to be learned and still so much that’s unknown. That’s where this week’s Embedded Executives podcast takes us. On this episode, I spoke to Mark Montierth, a Corporate VP and the General Manager of Micron’s Mobile Business Unit.

Pre-compliance testing is a phenomenon that should be a no-brainer, but for lots of reasons—none of them good—it’s not always done. When you’re doing a design that requires RF and you don’t do the testing, you’re really asking for trouble. That goes double for a product that’s going to ship into multiple geographies. To understand how this process should occur, I spoke to Paul Denisowski, a Product Management Engineer at Rohde & Schwarz, on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

Engineers are usually good at engineering, but writing? That’s a different story. In many cases, lacking the ability to write well can hurt engineers. This rears its ugly head when these engineers are job hunting. Having mis-spellings and bad grammar on a resume is a huge red flag. This is particularly true for some real cherry jobs attracting numerous applications.

To understand what this means and the effect it could have on an engineer’s future, I brought back Marcus Webster, who is the principal of Webster & Webster Associates. Marcus last spoke to us about the engineering shortage. Check out this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

AI MCU vendors have mostly been putting themselves into two camps when it comes to the ecosystem. On one side, the vendor is providing everything themselves. In the other camp, the vendor is relying on partners and the community at large to provide the ecosystem. I recently spoke to Steve Tateosian, SVP of Industrial MCUs, IoT, Wireless, and Compute Business at Infineon, as the company just announced a bunch of AI MCUs and I wanted to find out which camp he was residing in. Find out on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

In a rare move, I had two guests join me for this week’s Embedded Executives podcast, but for a good reason. I was joined by Mohammed Dogar, Vice President and Head of Global Business Development and Ecosystem at Renesas Electronics, and Sakya Dasgupta, Founder and CEO of EdgeCortix.

I asked them to join me together because they have partnered on some interesting Edge AI technologies. We walked through the Renesas vision and strategy for AI and machine learning (ML) and how that led to the partnership with EdgeCortix. More importantly, we discussed what that means to the design engineer and the embedded community at large.

The Embedded Kit recently conducted a survey to understand the biggest challenges facing an embedded developer. You would think those challenges are obvious, and some of them are, but the survey uncovered some fairly interesting areas that are not so obvious. If you’re interested in finding out where those not-so-obvious challenges exist, check out this week’s Embedded Executives podcast with Pierre Gal, Head of Product Development at The Embedded Kit.

Do you understand the metrology that applies to semiconductor manufacturing? I know I certainly didn’t, and found out how little I knew about this essential technology when I spoke to David Doyle, the President and Managing Director of Heidenhain Corp.

While mostly applying to semiconductors, the technology can be deployed on any manufacturing platform. But semiconductor manufacturing has to be so precise, and that’s putting it mildly, that things are measured in terms of microns and nanometers.

Check out this week’s Embedded Executives podcast. to get the baseline understanding on how important this technology is to our semiconductor industry.

The LoRa Alliance recently conducted a user study to see how far LoRaWAN technology has penetrated into the community. If you’re not familiar, LoRaWAN is a low-power wide-area network that has a range that can be measured in miles.

I wanted to understand what the results of the user study showed. Do developers feel confident in deploying the technology? How does it work globally? To understand more I spoke to the Alliance’s Chairwoman and CEO, Donna Moore, on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

Are SOMs and COMs the same thing? Some people would say yes, but in reality, they are not. So, what’s the difference. To get a better understanding of the matter, I spoke to Matthew Burns, a Global Director at Samtec on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast. The second part of this discussion is which is appropriate for your application. Tune in to find out.

Have you ever heard of an isolator without a power supply? I hadn’t either, until now, sort of. That’s not exactly what Infineon is launching, but it’s close enough that I needed to have a conversation with Daniel Callen, Infineon’s Sr. Manager in the Power IC Group to understand exactly what the company is launching.

If your application is in solid-state relays, industrial automation (PLCs), or commercial HVAC controllers, this is a conversation you should hear. Check out this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

MEMS have been used in lots of sensors and even in microphones. But, until now, I hadn’t seen them used in speakers. xMEMS Labs is one vendor that’s doing just that, and the sound is incredible. When you hear how it works, it really makes a lot of sense. And if you listen to this podcast, you will hear exactly how it works. Check out my discussion with Mike Housholder, the Vice President of Business Development at xMEMS Labs in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

There’s a new sheriff in town when it comes to the Z-Wave Alliance, a newly formed standards development organization. The new Chairman of the Board of Directors at the Z-Wave Alliance is Avi Rosenthal, whose day job is the Managing Partner of bluesalve partners.

I know Z Wave has been around for quite some time, but the Alliance was previously a manufacturer-owned group, and now it’s independent. That “launch” comes on the heels of a second supplier being added to the mix. Previously, you had to go to Silicon Labs to get your transceivers. Now that the spec is truly open, other transceiver manufacturers will likely come on line, and Trident IoT is the first to join. To hear more about what this means and where the spec and the Alliance is headed, check out this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

COM Express has been around for at least a decade. While many people think of it as a standard architecture (it is), it can be customized in lots of different ways. To understand how a standard can be made custom while remaining standard, I spoke to Earle Foster, a Senior Vice President, Sealevel Systems in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast. It’s actually easier than you might think.

A few years ago, Microsoft acquired Express Logic, who’s key product was the ThreadX operating system. Fast forward to today, and Microsoft has released that operating system to the open-source community. Why did they do that? And what does that mean to the development community? I was really curious about these issues, so I spoke to Frédéric Desbiens, who manages the embedded, IoT, and Edge computing programs at the Eclipse Foundation on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

We appear to be over the hump between hype and reality when it comes to GaN technology. Components and end products are readily available. But according to David Snook, the product line manager for  GaN products at Texas Instruments (TI), we are just scratching the surface of where GaN’s potential lies. Hear more in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

Timing devices within embedded systems are likely the most important components that you don’t know anything about. That’s a paraphrase from Piyush Sevalia, a Vice President at SiTime, and it’s certainly very true.

When you get into 5G applications, the effects are often working against you, like use in extreme temperatures, or in ruggedized applications. This makes the tolerances even more difficult to match. What to do? Your first step is to check out this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

I feel like we have been two years away from fully autonomous vehicles for the last five years. It gets difficult to differentiate between what’s accurate and what’s fiction. To try to get at the truth, I spoke to Avijit Sinha, the newly appointed President of Wind River for this week’s Embedded Executive podcast. We get into the hardware, the software, and the standards. Note that Avijit was promoted just after we recorded this podcast!

Are you familiar with Raspberry Pi? Of course you are. But are you aware of all the things that you can do with it, or should do with it? 

First, if you think it’s a low-compute-power board, you are mistaken. Second, if you think you can’t go to production with a Pi, you’d be mistaken again. If you don’t believe me, listen to what Eben Upton, the Founder of Raspberry Pi had to say in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

Memory is typically a very simple component in your embedded system—or is it? I spent some time with Barry Blixt, a Director for Microchip’s memory business. We went through a list of typical memory “myths” to determine what’s true and what’s not true. Does memory wear out? How about rotating memory? These are some of the topics we covered. Check out this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

When it comes to writing code, we have a manpower problem. While that’s true for most aspects of the embedded engineering/development space, it’s particularly true for those folks writing firmware, which is one of the most critical, yet least glamorous parts of our profession. What’s the solution? Is it AI, to have the code written for us? That’s one of the potential solutions.  Listen to a few more in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast with Bill Merkel,  Vice President of Business Development at USA Firmware.

When it comes to the ecosystem, particularly around AI, you need all the parts to be available if you want to develop a system. We know that ecosystems forever continue to evolve, but it’s safe to dive into the waters at this point, according to Mohammed Dogar, the Vice President and Head of Global Business Development and Ecosystem at Renesas Electronics. In this week’s Embedded Executive podcast, we discuss, among other things, how the AI ecosystem has evolved, and what users can expect at this point.

Wearable medical devices are poised to take off. I mean, really take off, thanks to a few different drivers, such as the aging population, the pandemic, and some concessions from the insurance companies.

Manufacturers are ready to make these devices available, in a huge way. Think hundreds of millions. And if each one of those has an MCU, that’s a lot of MCUs. I got much more in depth in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast with Fritz Werder leads the Life business for Silicon Labs.

Developers struggle with how to manage the power in their end devices. There’s obviously a tradeoff between performance and how much/how long to keep components powered up. It’s obviously application-specific, but it’s important to make the right decision. With Infineon’s PSoC device, those developers have some new choices, and are hopefully capable of simplifying the design at the same time. 

To understand more about the new device family, I sat down with Steve Tateosian, Senior Vice President of the IoT, Compute, and Wireless Business Unit at Infineon Technologies. Hear from the expert about what choices are available to you in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

We talk about security a lot here at Embedded Computing Design. If it’s not the number one subject, it’s certainly in the top three. But the discussion I had with Thomas Rosteck, the Division President for Connected Secure Systems at Infineon Technologies went down a slightly different path, and that’s because, unfortunately, security is such a dynamic field, seemingly changing on a daily basis.

Thomas walks me through the issues that are prevalent today, and I learned that those same issues may be in the rearview mirror pretty quickly. Check out this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

We have an engineering shortage. Anyone who's familiar with our space wouldn't dispute that. And if you look at the projections, we’re going to need a whole lot more of us going forward. Why is that the case, and more importantly, what are we going to do about it?

To try and understand this dilemma and the potential solution(s), I spoke to Marcus Webster, who is the principal of Webster & Webster Associates and a recruiter for most of the companies that you’re aware of. Check out this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

Quantum computing raises the potential for anything to be hacked, and that includes government systems. Hence, the people behind the CHIPS Act want to make sure that the money that’s used for semiconductor development is being used in the areas that it deems most important.

To understand how that works, I spoke to Reza Azarderakhsh, the Founder and CEO of PQSecure Technologies on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast. Reza is tied pretty closely to this initiative, as his company specializes in implementing security measures.

Quantum computing can be a very complex area. Many experts will tell you that it could be as long as a decade before quantum computers actually appear on the scenes.

This week’s Embedded Executives podcast guest says that his company is providing quantum computing today. Hear it directly from Chris Balance, the co-founder and CEO of Oxford Ionics.

If you’re a consumer, 5G is likely in your universe. If you’re working on the industrial side, you’re likely not seeing 5G at all. And it may be many years before it’s even available in limited deployments. Why is that? That’s the question I asked of Olivier Pauzet, the EVP of Strategy for Sequans Communications in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

Sustainability continues to be a topic of interest. First, what does sustainability actually mean? Second, what are some of the industry giants doing about it?

In our space, STMicroelectronics would be one of those giants, so I spoke to Mahesh Chowdhary, an STMicroelectronics Fellow and the Senior Director of MEMS Software Solutions, about what’s happening at his company in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

Bringing all the different elements together for an AI-based hardware platform is harder than it sounds, especially when you start considering the environmental conditions. Getting it to work in the lab is one thing, but the real world presents challenges you may not have thought of.

SparkCognition has developed a test environment that considers everything because they are testing in the field, literally. To understand what that means, I spoke to Milton Lopez, the head of design for SparkCognition on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

There are better ways to write embedded code than the traditional methods. Doing it in a visual fashion is one of those ways. But how does that work, and how does it adapt specifically to my hardware? While you might have thought such technology was already available, Duncan Haldane, the CEO of JITX says that’s not the case. Hear what he has to say on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

It seems like more and more engineers are graduating from universities, yet we still need more. There are a few reasons for this.

First, there’s simply a demand for hardware and software engineers as our devices become “electrified.” And second, the universities are doing a less than stellar job of getting their graduates ready to dive right in. How do we fix these issues?

Those are just some of the points we covered on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast, where my guest was Dr. Khaled Benkrid, Arm’s Director of Education and Research, and former college professor.

ESG stands for environmental, social, and governance, and it’s something we are hearing a lot about lately. However, in my role as our industry’s devil’s advocate, I want to know if this is a real thing, or just a company line from some of the players in our industry.

To try and vet that out, I spoke to Stacy Mendez, Avnet’s director of Global Strategic Planning and ESG. Stacy explained what ESG means, what Avnet’s take is on it, and why it’s a real thing. Hear what she had to say on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

Speech recognition on an FPGA? That doesn’t sound like the most effective path, but Bill Jenkins, of Achronix had a different opinion. Hear his take on why the FPGA is the right way to go for this application on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

We say all the time that any system can be hacked, and this week’s Embedded Executives podcast guest is someone who can get into your system.

Ken Westin, CISO of Panther Labs, is who we'd call a white-hat hacker. He hacks for good reasons, sometimes to follow a bad hacker and return data, and sometimes to help close up holes in a system. Nonetheless, this is an interesting interview and worth a listen. 

Having a standard that everyone can design to makes markets take off. Open source, both hardware and software, is nothing new. But when paired with AI, it is relatively new.

Intel is trying to provide that API for people to design to with its OneAPI initiative. Obviously, you can go that route and run with Intel hardware. But you’re not locked into Intel. You can use the hardware of your choice, assuming that hardware manufacturer conforms to the API.

Joe Curley, Intel’s Vice President and General Manager of Software Products explains how this works and what it means to the development community on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again—John Deere is a technology leader that sells agriculture equipment, not the other way around. This week, I spoke to Maya Sripadam, a Senior Product Manager at Blue River Technology, a John Deere Company, about autonomous vehicle design. It’s not automobiles, but it’s certainly related. In some ways, agriculture is easier than automotive autonomy, and in some ways it’s more difficult. Check out this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

Gallium nitride technology has been in the news quite a lot over past couple of years. It’s being touted as a far superior alternative to some of the competing technologies, particularly those that are silicon-based.

However, there’s been some buzz lately that GaN is not a reliable technology. To get to the truth, I spoke to Denis Marcon, the General Manager of Innoscience Europe on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast. Innoscience is one of the leaders in GaN technology and its components.

Big announcement from the Biden administration—the U.S. Cyber Trust Mark. In its simplest form, it’s a logo/sticker that goes onto any compliant IoT device. In its most complex form, designers need to understand what this standard is all about. Hence, Steve Hanna, a Distinguished Engineer at Infineon and also the Chair of the Product Security Working Group in the Connectivity Standards Alliance (CSA) was my guest on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast. Steve explained what this means today and going forward.

AI is here and it’s everywhere. However, AI is not the end game. AI is used to reach the end game, whatever that happens to be. That’s somewhat of a paradigm shift for today’s design community who appear to be developing for the application of AI, when there really isn’t one. To confirm my thoughts, I spoke to Jérôme Gigot, a senior director of AIoT at Ambarella on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast. Tune in to hear what he had to say.

Compute Express Link, aka CXL, is a low-latency, cache-coherent interconnect that connects processors, memory, and other accelerator devices. It’s built on top of PCI Express. Over the past couple of years, it’s been emerging as the winner in the interface wars. If you are not familiar with this spec, you need to know it, understand it, and potentially design to it. To get a better understanding of this relatively new specification, I spoke to Mark Orthodoxou, the Vice President of Strategic Marketing, SoCs, at Rambus on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

Energy harvesting has been with us for quite some time, but it has not achieved the lofty goals that industry insiders predicted. However, it’s still making inroads into applications that make the most sense. To understand what those applications are and how it should work, I spoke to Paul Davis, Vice President of Product Management at Atmosic Technologies on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

Software-defined storage is a relatively new technology. It does the same job as the large storage box, but without the large storage box. Huh? Yup, that’s right. It didn’t make sense to me at first either, but I went to an expert, Boyan Krosnov, the CTO and co-founder of StorPool, to get an explanation. Check it out on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

We talk a lot here about Edge-based AI and all the things that it can accomplish. But that leaves out a significant portion of the market, that being Cloud-based AI and machine learning.

According to one expert, Christina Mongan, the Director of Emerging Technologies on the Innovation Ecosystem and Emerging Technologies team at Unisys, Cloud-based AI is experiencing significant growth. To understand why that’s happening and what can be expected going forward, I spoke to Christina on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

We talk a lot here about Edge-based AI and all the things that it can accomplish. But that leaves out a significant portion of the market, that being Cloud-based AI and machine learning.  According to one expert, Christina Mongan, the Director of Emerging Technologies on the Innovation Ecosystem and Emerging Technologies team at Unisys, Cloud-based AI is experiencing significant growth. To understand why that’s happening and what can be expected going forward, I spoke to Christina on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

A few years ago, businesses reaped big benefits from federal tax cuts. However, that money needed to come from somewhere. Unfortunately, it didn’t work out exactly how the Fed expected, and it’s putting the clamps on some of the smaller companies in our engineering space. To understand exactly what that means and the effect it’s having and will continue to have in our space, I spoke to Jeff Hibbard, the CEO IntervalZero on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

Fast-charging an end device like a smart phone in under 10 minutes using Gallium Nitride (GaN) power components is awesome. However, it’s not as great as it sounds, for a few reasons. First, if you don’t have the latest and greatest battery technology, you may be doing damage to your battery. In addition, most of our phones are limiting the speed at which the battery can be charged, negating the advantages of GaN. To fully understand this, I spoke to Stephen Oliver, Vice President at Navitas Semiconductor on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

DRAM is DRAM, right? There’s no difference from manufacturer to manufacturer. If that’s your take, you’ll likely find yourself in trouble when it comes to your design’s memory subsystem. As Frank Henville, a Technical Manager at Apacer, told me during this week’s Embedded Executives podcast, they are quite different. If you don’t believe me, I suggest you give it a listen.

Digital RF is something you don’t hear a lot about, but it is being deployed in some of our embedded systems, including those that live at the Edge of the IoT. But, is it really digital? The technology can be somewhat confusing, so to get to the heart of the matter, I spoke with Massoud Tohidian, the CTO and Managing Partner of Qualinx B.V., a company that specializes in this digital RF. Check out this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

Semtech recently acquired Sierra Wireless. That’s a pretty big acquisition. To understand why it is was done and what it means to an embedded developer, I spoke to Pravin Desale, the Senior Vice President of IoT Engineering at Semtech on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast. There are obviously synergies between the companies, but was an acquisition really the best move? You’ll hear about that and more.

The FPGA vendors would have you believe that designing with their components is a piece of cake. Connect a few dots here and there, and presto, your chip is ready to go. But we all know that’s not really the case. To understand what’s really involved, and whether this something a novice should be taking on without any real formal training, I spoke to Philipp Baechtold, the CEO of Enclustra on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast. His company can either train you to do your FPGA-based design, or they can do it for you.

Every application obviously needs some form of memory, and since every application is somewhat different, you’d expect most applications to have a dedicated memory type. That thinking would not be wrong. To that end, Infineon has worked with some other industry giants to develop a new memory type for the electrification of automobiles. To understand how this new memory differs from what’s already out there and why it’s needed, I spoke to Sandeep Krishnegowda, the Vice President of Marketing and Applications for Memory at Infineon Technologies in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

If you’re looking to sense vibrations, check out Taifang Technology and its elastic-wave technology. They are sensing vibrations that are so small you can’t really receive them any other way. For example, if the sensor is embedded into a automobile, it can detect immediately, within 10 ms, when contact is made with the car. It can also report if someone is trying to break into a car. But there are tons of applications outside of automotive. To understand how it works, check out this week’s Embedded Executives podcast with Bob Yang, the Executive Director for Business Development for Taifang Technology.

Most security prevention methods aim at detecting when a hack is occurring. Hence, term detection-based security. By embedded your cyber-security inside your memory subsystem, you make it prevention-based, essentially stopping the attack before it occurs. To be honest, I did not understand what that meant, so I spoke to Tom Ricoy, an officer at Cigent, to explain how it works on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

With the voltage levels for GaN power semiconductors moving up and the levels for SiC moving down, we have an overlap, where either type of device would be suitable for the job.

So which should you choose?

In addition, if you’re designing an end product, how comfortable are you, knowing that many of these power devices don’t have second sources? These are some of the questions I asked of Peter Friedrichs, Infineon Technologies’ Vice President of Silicon Carbide on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

Here we go again; 8-bit MCUs are not dead yet. I said a few years ago that I’d give this argument up, and simply wait for the official announcement, but apparently, I shouldn’t hold my breath. Who better to know if 8-bit MCUs are shipping in big (really big) volumes, but Microchip. Hence, I had a conversation with Steve Kennelly, Microchip’s Associate Director of its Medical Products Group. He was this week’s guest on our Embedded Executives podcast.

Enovix is a battery company that designs, manufactures, and sells batteries with a three-dimensional cell architecture that increases energy density and maintains high cycle life. The targets for these cells could be any type of mobile device.

Ashok Lahiri, Enovix’s Advisor and Co-Founder, gave me great information on why the technology works so well and where it can be used most appropriately. Check out this week’s Embedded Executives podcast to learn more.

Far-field voice is something that’s hard to decipher, mostly because it’s far. I know that’s overly simplistic, but it’s true. For a much better explanation of this and a detailed description on how it works, I spoke to Scott McNeese, the Director of Voice and Audio for ArkX Labs, on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast. The company specializes in voice technology for consumer devices.

Infineon has partnered with a bunch of folks to simplify the lives of system developers, specifically those who want to integrate Bluetooth. Those partners include module vendors and software providers. To understand what this means, I spoke to Sivaram Trikutam, the Vice President of Infineon’s Wi-Fi product line on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

The LoRa Alliance is an open, nonprofit association that represents the LoRaWAN standard. LoRa is growing quickly and expanding into a host of both new geographies and new applications. To see where its headed and why it’s been so successful, I spoke to the Alliance’s Chairwoman, Donna Moore, on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

As a sidenote, the LoRa Alliance will be holding its first live event of 2023, LoRaWAN Live, in a couple of weeks in Orlando. 

And you may want to check out the End of Year Report that Donna references in the podcast.

Five years ago, the experts said that autonomous-drive vehicles were five years out. Now, five years later, they still appear to be five years out? Why is that? To try to get to the bottom of the issue, I spoke to someone who knows far more about the technology than me, Stan Schneider, the CEO of RTI on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

Silicon Carbide (SiC) is a hot technology. The topic/technology seems to be coming up more and more. I was curious as to why that was the case, so I spoke to someone who is an expert on the subject for this week’s Embedded Executives podcast. That expert is Simon Keeton, the EVP and GM of onsemi’s Power Solutions Group.

Intel recently launched a new addition to its Sapphire Rapids scalable processor family. The addition delivers a performance boost, but as you might expect, it’s a whole lot more involved than that. To understand what the announcement means to the embedded developer, I chatted with Vik Malyala,  Managing Director and President of the EMEA Division at Supermicro. In this week’s Embedded Executives podcast, Vik explains how these changes, mostly positive, affect both the hardware and software designs of the system.

If you’ve been in the embedded space for any length of time, you’re likely familiar with the ThreadX real-time operating system, which was a product of Express Logic. That company was acquired by Microsoft, and it’s President, Bill Lamie, went along with the team to Microsoft…until now. Bill is back out on this own, with a new company (PX5) and a new OS, called the PX5 RTOS. How this OS differs from the competition and how a new start-up company can dislodge some of the large competitors was topic du jour in my discussion with Bill in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

Security, security, security. You’d think by now that the process for security would be so automated and automatic we wouldn’t be having these same discussions as to why designers are reluctant to design it in, or what applications really require it. Alas, here we are.

To try, yet again, to understand why we still have the same discussions over and over, I spoke to Paul Chawla, the CEO of Eurotech. Eurotech likes to live on the Edge of the IoT, so they well understand the need for advanced security at the Edge, in the Cloud, at the endpoint. Hear what Paul had to say on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

5G brings a lot of promise to the embedded space, in addition to many other spaces. This week’s Embedded Executives podcast guest knows far more about 5G than most people. Paul Stager, EdgeQ’s Director of Engineering, and I talked about when it’s coming, how it’ll be deployed, and what designers need to know to avoid the potential minefield that 5G has become.

Bob Scaccia, the President and CEO of USA Firmware, knows more about firmware than anyone I’ve ever come across. And speaking of firmware, it is an art that does not get nearly the attention  it should, and for a long list of reasons. In this podcast, i'll go through those reasons and a lot more firmware-related issues. Tune in.

For those of you who agree with Bob Scaccia's perspective, here’s his ask: help him, help us, help our firmware community by coming together and consistently explaining why firmware matters. If we align and educate from the same viewpoint, we can turn firmware from invisible to visible, and give the discipline the respect it deserves in this era of mass device and IoT adoption. Only acting in unity can we educate the media and the general public as well. On your mobile device, text yesfirmware to 877-379-4135 join the movement to make firmware visible.

The chip shortage is getting better. It’s getting worse. No, it’s getting better. These are the responses I continue to hear. To hopefully arrive at the truth, I went to someone in "the know", and that's Peggy Carrieres, Avnet’s Global Vice President of Sales Enablement and Supplier Development. As a distributor, Avnet knows as well as anyone what’s available and what’s not. Hear what Peggy had to say on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

As an embedded developer, does a “common platform” reduce your ability to innovate? That’s a connect and a theory I discussed with Ron Martino, NXP’s Executive Vice President of Global Sales. NXP is offering such a strategy to its community, so I was curious to hear more about it, which I did on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

Macronix is a memory vendor who claims to offer “memory-centric computing.” When I heard about this concept, I wondered if it was something real, or just marketing spin. To find out, I went to the source,  Macronix and invited Anthony Le, Vice President at Macronix America, to be my guest on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

Virtual hardware modeling is not a new concept, but it’s now getting a new spin, particularly when you’re working with Arm-based IP cores. To understand what this means and how it can benefit an embedded developer, I spoke to Bill Neifert, the Senior Vice President of Partnerships at Corellium on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast. While the Corellium partnership is with Arm, it extends out to the company’s partners, as well as AWS partners.

Codasip just joined the OpenHW Group and assuming you’re familiar with that organization, you might wonder why they did that. But I didn’t want to assume, so we started this podcast by asking why people should even care about the OpenHW. My guest for this week’s Embedded Executives podcast was Rupert Baines, the CMO of Codasip.

Here’s an Embedded Executive podcast you didn’t expect from me. This week’s guest is John O'Hurley, who you may know as J. Peterman from what was one of the popular television comedies ever, Seinfeld. John actually has a place in our embedded sphere, along with his business partner Becky Wanta with the company Q5id. Their company is a player in the identify theft arena, helping consumers keep their identities to themselves. The company operates differently from its competitors. I suggest you check it out, and hear it right from John O'Hurley, aka J. Peterman in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

Quantum cryptography is very much in the spotlight these days. But do you know why? For that matter, do you understand what it means? And most importantly, if you’re an embedded developer, should you be concerned about it? Those are the important questions that I got answers to when I spoke to Thomas Prest, the Lead Cryptographic Researcher at PQShield on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

The 5G standard seems to be working through the embedded industry at a snail’s pace when you compare it to other aspects of our technology sector. Why is that, and what do you do about it if you’re a design engineer? To try and get a handle on how to be compliant, yet stay at the leading edge, I spoke to Mamta Gupta, the Director of Security and Communications Segment Marketing at Lattice Semiconductor on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

Jack Ganssle is one of the most recognizable people in the embedded systems industry, starting as an engineer and working his way through the ranks to be legitimately known as one of the world’s leading experts in the space. Jack took some time from his busy schedule to walk down memory lane and discuss how the embedded space has changed over the years. Check out this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

The ink is not yet dried on the Matter specification. Those in the know claim that this is one of the most important specifications to come across the electronics space in a long, long time, particularly for IoT devices makers. Are you in the know? One expert who is up to speed on all the speeds and feeds is Skip Ashton, a Distinguished Engineer with Infineon Technologies, and he was my guest on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

There are few products more popular in the embedded space than the Arduino development board. What makes that statement even more interesting has to do with the number of dev boards that have become available over the last few years. Why is Arduino so important to the embedded development community? That’s the question I posed to Arduino’s CEO, Fabio Violante. We talked the company's development board, about the future of the product, and lots of other things in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

“Matter is a great standard, if you assume it’s just a starting point. Oh, and it’s 10 years too late.” This is how the discussion started with Ian Drew, the Chairman of Foundries.io in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast. Ian, who is a long-time veteran of our embedded and IoT industries, sits in the cat-bird’s seat on this and similar topics. As you’ll hear, we went back and forth as to whether his comments were accurate.

Just when you think it’s safe to go back in the water…I’m making an analogy about secure designs. Just when you think the engineering community understands that their designs need to be secure, some research pops up to show that that’s not really the case. Even in these times of hack after hack, designers are still not doing everything they need to do to stop the bad guys. Why is this? To get to the bottom of this issue, I spoke to Mark Hermeling, the Vice President of Global Solutions Engineering at GrammaTech. Hear his perspective in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

The topic on Embedded Executives eventually gets around to security, the specialty of BG Networks, but we had an interesting discussion about what’s happening in today’s universities. My guest on this this week’s Embedded Executives podcast was Roman Lysecky, the CTO of BG Networks. We eventually got around to the topic at hand, one in which I wasn’t familiar with, cyber-resilience. As we break down security into its many facets, this is one that you need to be aware of.

The embedded community has been talking a lot about AI at the Edge. Apparently, it’s not just, as Renesas recently acquired Reality AI. That acquisition lets them leverage a large customer base as well as provides access to what the company is calling a "leading-edge toolset and series of AI models."

Renesas probably could have built tools and models themselves, but not nearly as quickly as getting them through acquisition. Hear from from the horse’s mouth why this acquisition was made and what the future holds in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast with Sailesh Chittipeddi, the Executive Vice President and General Manager of Renesas’ IoT and Infrastructure Business Unit.

“The IoT industry needs to change.” Those were the words uttered by this week’s Embedded Executives podcast guest, Ian Drew, the Chairman of Foundries.io. Ian is a long-time veteran of our embedded and IoT industries, and has a pretty colorful history, so you may want to take note of his comments. Tune in to the full interview now!

I say it often, "It’s just storage, what could be new or exciting about it?" And each time I express that opinion to one of the memory experts, I get an earful of what’s new and different. My conversation with Frank Chen, the CEO of Exascend, went down a similar path. Frank came up with a host of reasons why people should pay closer attention to their memory subsystems. Hear what he has to say in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

The experts at Cycuity preach taking a holistic approach to security in your embedded system. That sounds like a good plan, but what does it mean? That’s the first question I posed to Andreas Kuehlmann, the CEO of Cycuity. And just in case you’re wondering who Cycuity is, it’s the former Tortuga Logic, with a new name. Check out this week’s Embedded Executives podcast to hear more.

The LoRaWAN specification continues to introduce new products, technologies, applications, and use cases on a regular basis. The consortium recently held a large-scale conference to discuss, display, and tout the latest developments. As such, I invited Alistair Fulton, the Senior Vice President and General Manager of Semtech’s Wireless and Sensing Products Group, to join me on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast. Note that Semtech plays a big role in both the LoRA Alliance and its ecosystem.

Atomera is a semiconductor materials and IP licensing company. They acknowledge that Moore’s Law is slowing down. Manufacturers are looking for ways to reverse that trend. And as you might expect, it comes at a significant cost. Atomera has a series of improvements that could help. To learn more, I spoke to Scott Bibaud, the President and CEO of Atomera. I suggest you check out this week’s Embedded Executives podcast to hear some of these ideas.

What RTOS dominates the embedded space? Your first guess might be Linux, but you would be wrong, by a wide margin. FreeRTOS is the winner. If you’re wondering how and why FreeRTOS came to be, this is the podcast for you. Today i'm speaking with the RTOS’s original creator, Richard Barry. Richard is now part of Amazon Web Services (AWS), but he is still leading the charge for FreeRTOS. Hear how it came about, and where Richard thinks it’s going on this this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

Many applications today are “software-defined.” Until recently, I would not have used that term to describe an automobile, but I’ve since been set straight. In this this week’s Embedded Executives podcast I spoke to Jeff Chou, the CEO and founder of Sonatus, who gave me his definition of the software-defined automobile and explained why it’s far better to handle these functions in software versus hardware.

When you have a chance to chat with somebody who is a pioneer in the embedded space, you grab it. And that’s what happened this week when Rolf Segger, Founder of Segger Microcontroller, agreed to be my guest on this this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.  Rolf is known for not pulling any punches and he was quite honest with me when we discussed what’s happening in the world of embedded. We talked about RTOSs and security amongst other topics.

Are you familiar with model-based systems engineering (MBSE)? I have to admit that I was not familiar with, but it looked like something I should know about. To educate myself, I had a discussion with Marco Leon, the Director of Systems Architecture Engineering at Mercury Systems, in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast. As a relatively new technique, it's designed to reduce your design risk.

When it comes to embedded computers for industrial applications, size does matter—sometimes. Many of the industrial platforms cut a fairly wide berth, so you can take a lot of liberties with the embedded computer board. But for those applications where space is at a premium, systems integrators don’t have the same number of options. One option that’s now available is the Interceptor from BlackPearl Technology. In this week’s Embedded Executives podcast, I spoke to Dave Smith, Co-Founder and VP of Innovation at Black Pearl, and we discussed when and where a platform like this one makes sense.

Processors to handle AI at the Edge are quite complex. However, that hasn’t stopped so many companies from producing their variants. In some cases, they come from the established MCU providers, and in other cases, they come from startups. Kinara fits that latter category. As we discussed in this this week’s Embedded Executives podcast, it’s really hard to differentiate yourself. I asked the company’s CEO, Ravi Annavajjhala, what makes his company stand out amongst some pretty stiff competition.

I have done lots of these Embedded Executive podcasts, a few hundred in fact. This particular podcast goes in a direction I have never gone before, and involves the mafia (yes, you read that correctly). John Costello, who serves as the Corporate Vice President Government Affairs for Microchip Technology, has some stories to tell that involve members of his (literal) family, and their dealings on the dark side. John wrote a book called Executive Hoodlum that’s extremely interesting and we cover some of what he wrote about. Definitely check out this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

For starters, Smith is the largest electronics distributer that I have never heard of. They are a multi-billion-dollar company. One of the strengths of the company is ensuring that its products are real (as opposed to counterfeits). That’s harder than it sounds, but vital to a developer. As we know, fake parts likely don’t provide the same operating characteristics as real parts. To understand how Smith tackles this process, I spoke to the company’s CEO, Kirk Wehby in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

Richard Lind is about seven months into his role as CEO of IAR Systems, one of the leaders in embedded development tools. One of his biggest competitors has a huge advantage—their tool is free! Or is it really? That’s the question I asked of Richard, and he had a very interesting response in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

Texas Instruments is a big company. One thing that’s afforded by a company of its size is a lab that can help the various product groups on their designs. And that’s the role of Kilby Labs at TI. The group is good at assessing risk, understanding whether a product should follow through to full development, and so on. To explain it far better than that, I invited Dr. Jeffrey Morroni, the Director of Power Management R&D for Kilby Labs, at Texas Instruments on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

Artificial intelligence is all the rage. Combine that with the huge amount of video that’s being captured. When you put these two phenomena together, you can (potentially) do some great things. And those great things are done by making use of the analytics that comes from the video after running through an AI engine. Confused? I know that I was, and for that reason, I invited Jaidev Amrite, the Director of Product Management at SparkCognition to be my guest on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast. Jaidev explained what you can actually do and what it takes to get there.

The chip shortage and supply-chain issues are not getting better. In some cases, it might be a simple, inexpensive IC that holds up your production. But it doesn’t matter whether it’s a 50-cent part or a $200 microprocessor. That assembly line treats them equally when the supply runs dry.

To that end, the folks at Innoscience, one of the largest suppliers of GaN components, say that they are not experiencing the same issues as competitors (and non-competitors). Why is that the case? That’s where I started with this week’s Embedded Executives podcast, when I interviewed Denis Marcon, General Manager of Innoscience Europe. We went on to discuss other GaN issues as well.

The hardware side of RISC-V is ready for prime time. No one questions that.

The case against RISC-V has always been the tools and associated software, aka, the ecosystem. However, is that still a valid argument against RISC-V?

That’s the first of many questions I posed to Sailesh Chittipeddi, the Executive Vice President & General Manager of Renesas’ IoT and Infrastructure Business Unit. His company has a lot to potentially gain with RISC-V, so I was interested in hearing his opinion, which comes in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

AI is regularly in the spotlight because of all the great things that can be accomplish with it. However, while we don’t want to think of it that way, it’s also possible that AI can be used for nefarious reasons, and unfortunately, that’s what’s starting to happen. In this week’s Embedded Executives podcast, I spoke to Paul Keely, the Chief Cloud Officer for Open Systems. Paul explained how this is actually happening with AI technology, and what you should do to protect yourself.

The road to embedded world is getting longer and longer in that the number of stops continues to increase, as more embedded vendors sign on to exhibit their wares at the industry’s most significant event of the year. This stop lets you hear right from the horse’s mouth, so to speak, as Texas Instruments’ Sameer Wasson joins me on a podcast. Sameer is TI’s Vice President, Processor Business Unit. 

And be sure to check out the other stops we’ve made on the road to embedded world: AVerMedia, WINSYSTEMS, Diamond Systems, MACTRON GROUP, MiTAC, Neousys Technology, SECO, and iBase Technology.

We've been touting the benefits of long-range wide-area networks (WANs) for a long time now, but at what point do we say, “they’ve arrived”?  And what does that arrival even look like? Those are the questions I asked Marc Pégulu, Vice President of IoT in the wireless and sensing products group at Semtech, a company that is driving force behind LoRaWAN, the most popular WAN version. Tune in to hear more in this week's Embedded Executives podcast.

It’s always a great thing when technology is used for good reasons. Especially for safety and security purposes. We’ve seen a lot of examples of how AI can be used in airports, buses, train stations, and even college campuses to detect unusual activity. In this podcast we a joined by a product manager from AVerMedia to go though how and where this technology works best.

Consumer products and technology continue to evolve, particularly how we interact with them. Ensuring that the interaction is a smooth and seamless one is more difficult than it sounds. To that end, I spoke to Duncan Bosworth, General Manager of Custom Silicon and Consumer Solutions in Analog Devices’ Consumer Business Unit on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast. We discussed the interactions themselves, as well as how important the (lack of) power consumption is to the success of these products 

I have said for some time that there is a lot of confusion over what Industry 5.0 actually is. In this situation, I use the old “ask five people, get five different answers” axiom.

Michael Rada, who has been following this standard since its inception, begs to differ, saying that there is no confusion. It’s very black and white. To that end, I thought it would be appropriate to have Michael come on as a guest to explain A) what the spec actually says, and B) why there is confusion. Hear what he has to say on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

The road to embedded world this week takes us to Diamond Systems. But now we are taking a different route, per se. We are letting Jonathon Miller, the President of Diamond Systems, tell the story himself via a podcast. Jonathon discusses the products and technologies the company will be announcing, displaying, and demonstrating. In addition, Jonathon discusses the latest happenings with PC104.

 Check out the other stops we’ve made on the road to embedded world: MACTRON GROUP, MiTAC, Neousys Technology, SECO, and iBase Technology.

IoT databases are different from general databases. Really? That was a surprise to me. To understand the difference, I invited Sasan Montaseri, the founder of ITTIA to join me on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast. Sasan has a lot of insight into this technology, particularly with respect to how you need to secure that database.

Applications that require high-quality audio are fraught with issues. It may be a video conference call with lots of background noise or people that are too close or too far from the microphone. Or it could be an audio-enabled appliance that just can’t seem to get it right. But that’s changing, according to Paul Beckmann, the CEO and Founder of DSP Concepts. Paul was my guest on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast and he is behind a lot of these techniques that are driving the latest audio technologies.

Our embedded industry continues to change as the industry evolves with the latest technologies. As a result, the vendors who serve those industries must evolve as well. One such vendor, ADLINK Technologies, has gone public with how they plan to evolve. To understand exactly what that means, I invited Jim Liu, ADLINLK’s CEP to join me on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast. 

Curved displays are nothing new, but as you would expect, there has been lots of innovation in the space. These curved displays are starting to show up in new places, particularly in automobiles. Why has this technology become more of a reality? That’s what us asked in my discussion with Phillip LoPresti, the CEO of Tanvas, in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

AdaCore is one of the leaders in the Ada programming language. Ada has been around for a long time, and is time tested. AdaCore recently announced that it is working with Rust, which is far newer than Ada. To me, that sounds like a disconnect. To understand how and why this marriage occurred, I invited Quentin Ochem, the Lead for Product Management and Business Development at AdaCore and Florian Gilcher, the Managing Director of Ferrous Systems for this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

Memory is taking on a whole new role in the automobile. This is partly because there is so much required and partly because the memory has to perform at much higher levels than before. But is there such a thing as automotive memory? Is there a difference in memory for different applications? That’s where I started with my interview with Robert Bielby, Micron’s Senior Director of Automotive System Architecture. In this week’s Embedded Executives podcast, Robert explained why you need to peel back the skin to understand the differences.

We are now about a year into the official launch of PICMG’s COM-HPC standard. The spec launched with a lot of fanfare from the association, many of its members, and from Embedded Computing Design. To see what’s happened over the past year, I invited Christian Eder to join my weekly Embedded Executives podcast. Christian plays a key role within PICMG, serving as Chairman of the COM-HPC working group. Christian is also the Director of Marketing for congatec.

Infineon is undergoing a fairly significant change, in my eyes at least.

Whether it’s an intentional move or just one that’s happening through an unintended culture change, there’s no doubt that it is happening. What I mean by this is that, again in my opinion, the company is changing from one with a German culture to one with a Silicon Valley culture.

It’s possible (and likely) that the acquisition of Cypress Semi had a lot to do with that. Is this culture shift a good thing? In my opinion, it is. Is it real? To get the answer to that, I interviewed Shawn Slusser, an Infineon Senior Vice President in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

John Deere is pushing the envelope in the farming space. The company is on the leading edge with technologies like autonomous tractors. From my limited knowledge of the farming industry, that seems like it’s beyond what farmers are asking for. But I’ve clearly been misinformed, as the farmers are way ahead of what I realized, partly thanks to innovations from the likes of John Deere. Hear what they are providing in my interview with Joe Liefer, a Senior Product Manager for Autonomy for John Deere’s Intelligent Solutions Group (ISG) in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

WiFi is on the move again. WiFi 6 is becoming more entrenched, but WiFi 7 is just around the corner. Are these new iterations really necessary, or is it just a way to get users to upgrade to the latest and greatest? To that end, I invited Cees Links, the General Manager of Qorvo’s Wireless Business Division to join me for this week’s Embedded Executives podcast. In this episode, Cees runs through all the advantages and tradeoffs associated with each new flavor of WiFi , so designers and consumers can make an educated decision to plan their futures.

Sub-threshold technology has pushed microprocessor power levels down to places we have not seen before.  While it’s not a new technology, but something that Ambiq has been implementing for many years, why haven’t other vendors implemented it, if it’s so promising?
That’s the question I started with in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast with my guest,  Ambiq’s Vice President of AI, Carlos Morales.

The discussion of SoC versus ASSP has been going on for as long as these devices have existed. The pendulum seems to shift over time, depending on which applications are hot at the moment (is there currently a killer app?), how much the manufacturing costs are, and a host of other factors. To understand where the discussion sits today, I spoke to Rajinder Cheema, the Senior Vice President of Engineering at Socionext America in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

We’ve been talking a lot lately about what it means to be “real time.” In theory, it’s not something that’s achievable. But in practice, “good enough” is good enough for many applications. Another product to hit the market recently is a real-time database, developed by McObject. When I saw that release, I jumped at the chance to speak to Steve Graves, McObject’s President and CEO, to see if his definition matched mine. Check out this week’s Embedded Executives podcast to hear Steve’s thoughts.

Since we’ve turned the page on a new year, it’s time to make some predictions. I asked Brandon Lewis, the Embedded Computing Design Editor-in-Chief, to join me and make some predictions for the new year. Some are likely expected and some might surprise you. Hear our thoughts in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

Newark recently conducted a poll of Makers and Professional Makers, looking at their board choices, operating environments, architectures, and so on. The results from the study were pretty eye-opening. Hence why I had a discussion with Cliff Ortmeyer, Newark’s Global Head of Technology Product Marketing and Solutions Development. We talked about results of the poll, why the respondents chose to respond they way they did, and whether developers were making choices for the right reasons. Check out our discussion in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

The Connectivity Standards Alliance (CSA) continues to be a force to be reckoned with within our embedded space. And I mean that in a good way. Today, we are discussing the security of consumer devices, which falls under the Matter portion of the CSA. That security design is now complete and the open-source implementation is near-ready.

According to Steve Hanna, a Distinguished Engineer at Infineon Technologies, Matter will be raising the security bar to where it needs to be. Obviously, security is a moving target, and the group will continue to evolve the standard.

Our second guest, Chris LaPre, Director of Technology for the CSA, speaks from the Alliance’s perspective on what needs to happen to get a large number of influential contributors to agree on a standard that continually keeps the end user in mind. 

Hear all that and more in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

AI should be performed at the Edge whenever possible, according to Yasser Khan,  CEO and Co-Founder of MicroAI. But there seems to be just as many reasons to do it in the Cloud. This is where the back-and-forth began in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

There are many applications that require real-time interactions. Automotive certainly fits into that category. But the term “real time” is bothersome to me, as it’s not something that’s achievable. We can get “near real time,” but that’s about as good as it gets. But is that good enough? That’s the question I asked Heather Gorr,  Senior Product Marketing Manager for the MATLAB product at Mathworks, in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

EVs can be confusing from a “what voltage does it run at” perspective. We have the 12-V lead-acid batteries that have been around for decades. But there are many new sizes, types, chemistries, and voltages. According to Patrick Kowalyk, a North American Automotive Principal Field Applications Engineer for Vicor, the way in which we deliver power within the automobile needs to change. To hear exactly how, tune in to this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

When designing your embedded system, the storage subsystem is not always at the top of the priority list. Depending on your system, that may be okay. But if you’re designing for automotive applications, that’s one way to get yourself in hot water. In this week’s Embedded Executives podcast, I talked to Robert Bielby, Micron’s Senior Director of Automotive System Architecture, to understand why the memory subsystem needs to move up the list, potentially way up.

We say it all the time: you are going to get hacked! The most important factor at this point is to minimize the damage when the inevitable occurs. If cybersecurity is not one of your top design priorities, you need to adjust your list. That said, this week’s Embedded Executives podcast guest is Alan Grau, the Vice President of Business Development for PQShield. Alan explains the pretty simple terms of what happens when an attack occurs and why it may be happening. 

Note that Alan is also a speaker at this year’s IoT Device Security Conference, talking place on Nov. 9 (and available any time after that). Lots of good talks, all looking at different aspects of IoT Device security, including the automotive, and industrial and consumer applications.

The IIC, formerly known as the Industrial Internet Consortium, has a new name. They’re still the IIC, but now the acronym stands for Industry IoT Consortium. You may be surprised why they made the change; I know that I was.  IIC’s Chief Technology Officer, Stephan Mellor, has the answer in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

Low-end AI might be an oxymoron, because it’s hard to associate anything to do with AI as being low-end. But with AI evolving so rapidly, there really can be a case made for lower-end AI with machine vision. To understand what that means, what products fit that category, and most importantly, how it effects today’s embedded developers, check out this week’s Embedded Executives podcast with Donato Montanari, the Vice President and General Manager of Machine Vision at Zebra Technologies.

ISI, or Interconnect Systems International, was acquired by Molex in the recent past. The company is in the manufacturing space, particularly in terms of packaging, at both the chip and board levels. That puts the company in an interesting position when it comes to the chip shortage, as the company’s engineers have the ability to help customers redesign the boards to accommodate for different parts to replace those that simply are not available. To that end, I spoke with Tom Casey, a Vice president at ISI to hear how that’s working out. Check out this week’s Embedded Executives podcast to hear Tom’s thoughts.

If you could operate WiFi at the power levels typically associated with Bluetooth, do you really need Bluetooth anymore? I would think not, because WiFi offers so much more functionality, particularly the longer range. However, as this is usually the case, the answer is, “not so fast.” I asked that question (and many more) of Rob McCormick, a Director at InnoPhase, a company that specializes in low-power WiFi. He set me straight—for now. Check out this week’s Embedded Executives podcast to hear why.

Testing for physical interfaces, especially in the automotive space, can be quite challenging. It’s a harsh environment for starters, but there are other issues to contend with as well. I went through those issues, and how to deal with them with Mike Schnecker, a Business Development Manager for Rohde & Schwarz in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

In theory, developers should be writing their code well before the hardware is available. In practice, that’s not usually the case, for a host of reasons. CacheQ Systems has come up with a method that greatly simplifies this process, and really does allow developers to get down to business without the ready hardware. How do they do that? That’s what you’ll learn in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast with Clay Johnson, CacheQ Systems’ CEO) and Co-Founder.

Are you familiar with “analog machine learning?” If the answer is yes, then you’re likely in the minority. I find myself in the other group. Hence, in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast, I spoke to Tom Doyle, Aspinity’s Founder and CEO. Aspinity specializes in that technology and Tom explained what it is, how it works, and why I should care.

The global chip shortage continues to rage on, and it appears to be worsening rather than getting better. Different people have different reasons for why we are in this predicament, and Johnson Chen, an Executive at Winbond, is no different. Johnson brings a little different perspective, as he spends his time in Taiwan, and is focused on some specific applications, like automotive. Check out what he had to say in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

The Nexar platform, which is based on a Cloud architecture, allows designers the ability to collaborate in their PCB designs. It works with Altium’s 365 tool to enable a collaborative design process (In full disclosure, Nexar is a division of Altium). With lots of ecosystems partners coming into the fray, the designer has lots of choices when designing a PCB that’s just right for their application. I got all of this information and more from Ted Pawela, the Chief Ecosystem Officer at Altium and the Head of Nexar, in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

We are in a serious chip shortage. Why is that the case? Well, it depends who you ask. In this week’s Embedded Executives podcast, I asked Peggy Carrieres, who is the Global Vice President of Sales Enablement for Avnet. For better or worse, Avnet sits right in the middle of the shortage, and they make their business selling chips. Peggy explains why, but also gives some insight into what an engineer should do, both in the short term and the long term.

AI Day is right around the corner (on September 9). One of the sessions will cover how you actually build an AI platform. And to put our money where our mouth is, 16 lucky registrants will be selected randomly to receive a Topaz i7 platform from Simply NUC. In the session titled Hands-On Experience to Building Your First AI Solution Within an Hour, led by Raymond Lo, you will learn how to get an AI inference running lickety split using OpenVINO. Get more insight directly from Raymond in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

John Deere is obviously a leader in the agriculture space. Most of us know the company for its tractors, and products that are related to farming, etc. However, it’s come to my attention that AI is now front and center in many of the company’s products, particularly for “precision farming.” I found this surprising and interesting. How and why that’s happening is where I started with Zach Bonefas, an Automation Technology Leader at John Deere in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

Is 5G more hype than reality? After all this time, I sure hope not. There are pockets where 5G is actually in use, but a real full-scale rollout is still quite a ways away, particularly in the embedded and industrial sectors. So, when and where will we finally see 5G? That’s the question I asked Mike Fahrion, the Chief Technology Officer of Multi-Tech Systems in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast... And as you’ll hear, I didn’t let him off the hook too easily.

The Eclipse Foundation recently conducted a survey that focuses on IoT and Edge solutions. When I saw the results, I thought some sort of explanation was required, and that’s exactly what I got from Frederic Desbiens, Program Manager for IoT & Edge at the Eclipse Foundation in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

Firmware testing is often performed in a vacuum, aka a perfect environment in a lab. When taken out to the real world, the product may or may not perform as expected due to a variety of factors. To try and combat that, Memfault has designed a test platform that allows for testing in the field. And to get started, you can download the tool for free. To learn more about the pluses and minus of this technology, check out this week’s Embedded Executives podcast with François Baldassari, the CEO and Co-Founder of Memfault.

Security is one of the foremost topics in the embedded space today. In a recent conversation with Patrick Carrier, the Regional Manager for IoT and Cloud Security at Infineon Technologies, he had a different spin on security. Namely, there’s far more to it than whether you have or don’t have security built into your system. Not understanding what he meant by that, I thought it would be appropriate to have Patrick on as a guest on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

Develop an ASIC for less than $10,000? I didn’t believe it either. But according to Jeff DiCorpo, a Senior VP at efabless, not only is it possible, but people are doing it with his company’s tools. Learn how to generate your own design on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

LoRaWAN wants to invade your home. Its backers think that it’s perfect for many smart home applications. However, don’t we already have one — or two or three —wireless networks that are “perfect” for the home, namely Bluetooth and WiFi?

That’s how the conversation started with Remi Lorrain, Semtech’s LoRaWAN Network Director, in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

Two applications we discuss often at Embedded Computing Design are automotive and medical. More and more, these applications are making use of the Linux operating system. Why is that the case, and is it the same flavor for each? That’s where I started the interview with Shuah Khan, of the Linux Foundation. Shuah is both a Linux Kernel Fellow and Chair of the ELISA Project Technical Steering Committee, and she was my guest on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

Here’s a fact that won’t shock you—the automotive industry is in the midst of a huge transformation thanks to AI technology. Here’s another fact that won’t be a surprise—NVIDIA is smack in the middle of that transformation. To understand what that transformation is all about and how it’ll play out, I spoke to Danny Shapiro, NVIDIA’s Senior Director of Automotive in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast. Spoiler alert: we needn’t wait for 5G to make autonomous drive a reality.

Is Intel teaming up with SiFive to produce RISC-V chips? It depends how much you read between the lines in a recent release from SiFive. Rather than speculate, I decided to go to the source and ask the folks at SiFive what’s going on, and that’s what I did with James Prior, SiFive’s Head of Global Communications, in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

We spent a lot of time talking about the specification known as CHIP (Connected Home over IP). While the hard work on this topic continues, the names of the group and the standard have changed. This includes Matter, which is a set of standards that encompass the connected home in a safe and secure manner, and the ZigBee Alliance. It sounds complicated, but if you listen to Steve Hanna, a Distinguished Engineer, Infineon Technologies, you’ll understand it as quickly as I did. Steve was my guest on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

It’s obvious that you can do 5G without AI. However, the inverse is not always true—adding 5G to AI makes the AI platform run far more efficiently. In the third of three podcasts, I discussed this topic with Allan Yang, the CTO of Advantech. Allan brings a great perspective, as his company is one of the architects behind AI platforms. Hear all about it in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

In case you were wondering, Part I looked at the general definition of AIoT, which you likely know, means different things to different people. Then in Part II, Allan and I discuss whether there’s really a need for AIoT, and if the current solutions are really solutions.

Being part of a division that works with artificial intelligence, you’d expect that the folks at Lenovo would come up with some innovative ways to operate during the pandemic. And you’d be right. Hear what Rob Herman, Lenovo’s General Manager of its Workstation and Client AI Business Unit had to say in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

AI and all its varied facets are new to most of the world. The technology is taking off and, in some developers’ eyes, a little faster than it should be. The reason for that pessimism has to do with the lack of testing that’s occurred and continues to (not) occur with respect to AI. Ken Grohe, the President of WekaIO joins me for this week’s Embedded Executives podcast where we discuss why this phenomenon is occurring, and what we should do about it.

It seems like there’s a new security solution popping up on a daily basis. One new entrant is SecuriThings, an IoT security vendor focusing on the healthcare industry. They’re moving one step up the food chain from our traditional embedded vendor in that their customer is the hospital, rather than the device maker. But the issues are just about the same. Hear it directly from SecuriThings CEO and Co-Founder Roy Dagan, in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

There’s no moss gathering on the RISC-V stone. The group continues to make progress in just about all facets of its roadmap. To understand what those milestones are (and why they are place), I spoke to the RISC-V International CTO Mark Himelstein in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

In part II of a three-part series, Allan Yang, the Chief Technology Officer of Advantech, joins to discuss whether the application defines and solves the problem, or has the IoT become a solution looking for a problem. I’m oversimplifying here, but check out this week’s Embedded Executives podcast to hear the details.

In part I, Allan and I put down our collective definitions of AIoT - level the playing field, so to speak.

Is memory that’s aimed at a specific market really customized for that segment, or is it just marketing spiel? We have mobile memory, IoT memory, AI memory, and so on. Are they really different? That’s the question I posed to Huibert Verhoeven, the Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Automotive, Mobile and Emerging business segments at Western Digital in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

InnovationLab is giving new meaning to printed electronics. The company is literally printing electronics, not like a typical PCB. The current application is for sensors, like temperature sensors, but the potential is huge (and inexpensive). Check out my discussion with Florian Ullrich, Head of Business Development for InnovationLab this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

This week’s podcast guest, Johanna Pingel, a Product Manager at MathWorks, said that engineers should be concerned with the AI workflow. Do you agree? Do you even know what that means? I didn’t so I decided to go directly to the source and ask the question. Hear the answer on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

We’ve defined AIoT on multiple occasions; it’s where AI intersects with the IoT. And for our purposes, it typically involves the Industrial IoT, aka IIoT. To understand what this means to a system developer, and the impact that it’s had on their business, I chatted with Allan Yang, the Chief Technology Officer of Advantech in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast. We started by discussing whether hardware is now simply a commodity, or whether innovation really can occur on the hardware side when it comes to AIoT.

There’s been a shift in the security outlook, at least in my eyes. We’ve moved from “how do I keep from getting hacked” to “I’m going to get hacked, so I need to minimize the fallout.” To find out if I’m alone in this belief, I discussed the topic with Harry Haramis, the General Manager of PrimeKey in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast. Hear what Harry has to say.

Security is clearly in the spotlight these days, and for good reason—hacks continue on a regular basis. But the pendulum has shifted from “you need to make your system is hackproof” to “you need to minimize the damage when the inevitable hack occurs.” Is there truth to this statement? That’s the question I asked Stefan Skarin, CEO, IAR Systems, the company that also owns the Secure Thingz brand in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

When you’re looking for somebody with a bird’s eye view of the electronics industry, there aren’t too many people with a better handle on things than the CEO of Avnet, Phil Gallagher. As my guest on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast, I went through a host of issues related to the industry, from the pandemic to the life of an up and coming engineer, to how a company can survive for 100 years.

Security is vital. However, there are many different ways to approach security. There’s hardware security and software security, but those vague descriptors don’t even scratch the surface on all the different implementation methods. Attaching your security to the MCU is the method of choice for Crypto Quantique, a startup in this space. To understand exactly what that means and how it works, I spoke to Shahram Mossayebi, the company’s CEO and Co-Founder, for this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

Just when you thought you had plugged all the holes, more vulnerability points pop up. Actually, in the case of the consumer IoT, they were there all along, just far less publicized. In the big scheme of things, having an individual get hacked is a big deal, but usually just for that one person. However, if you hack multiple people, you could be getting to a point where it’s a big deal for more than one individual. Phil Attfield, the CEO of Sequitur Labs, has a pretty handle on this and understands how and why every node needs to be secured, and that’s what we discussed in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

FPGAs represent a comfort zone for many design engineers. It’s not as bad as “if all I have is a hammer, every problem is a nail,” but you can see how the analogy might fit. Are FPGAs appropriate for mission-critical applications? They could be, if they’re deployed properly. Unfortunately, that’s not always the case. Hear more about this topic in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast with Terry Stratoudakis, the Co-founder and Managing Principal at ALE Consultants.

Wind River has been king of the RTOS hill for a long time. We can debate whether they are still the reigning king. But now, since last February, the company finds itself under new leadership, with the appointment of Kevin Dallas as President and CEO. And the company is undergoing a transformation. That transformation isa into a systems company, one that looks far beyond the RTOS. Hear it right from the horse’s mouth in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

PS: Have you seen the Wind River web site lately? I have to admit it had been a while for me, and it’s very different from what used to be there. Check it out.

I detect a disconnect—display technology continues to evolve. Not necessarily at breakneck speed, but fast enough that you want to upgrade your technology every few (five?) years. But in the places like airports, bus and train terminals, etc., they don’t want to upgrade that frequently. So what’s a display supplier to do? That’s the question I posed to David King, the President of Litemax, a leader in industrial displays, in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

It takes a huge amount of compute power to perform AI. In the past, those calculations occurred in the Cloud, where the cluster of processors would reside. The push today is to move AI out to the Edge. But can we handle the processing that’s required for AI out on the Edge? That’s the question I posed to Ed Kuzemchak, the Chief Technology Officer at Software Design Solutions, an Applied Visions company, in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

A hardware revolution is underway, thanks to software! Is it really? It is according to Dipti Vachani, the Senior Vice President and General Manager of Arm’s Automotive and IoT Lines of Business in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast. Dipti does a great job explaining why this is the case and what the developer community needs to do about it. Check it out.

Should you fear the quantum security apocalypse? Do you even know it is and what it means and how it can occur? If you have any doubt, I suggest you listen to this 

week’s Embedded Executives podcast, where I spoke to Alan Grau, the Vice President of IoT and Embedded Solutions at Sectigo.

What is mission critical? It’s one of those, “ask five people and you’ll get five different answers” questions. For this exercise, I asked the question of Arun Subbarao, the Vice President of Engineering at Lynx Software Technologies, because it’s something he deals with on a daily basis. Upon his response, the next questions was, “How far are you willing to go to make your system meet that criteria?” But the real questions is, “How much are you willing to pay?” And that’s just the beginning of this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

COVID-19 still starts just about every conversation, and that was the case in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast, when I spoke to Jason Carlson, the CEO of congatec. But I really wanted to discuss COM-HPC with Jason, a standard that’s just about ready for prime time. If you’re not familiar, COM-HPC is a new computer-on-module standard that is a 4X improvement over existing technology. Jason says it’s a “once every 10 years” technology. Learn more about it, like I did, from Jason.

When it comes to security, nothing should be taken for granted and a developer should never assume. First, start the security discussion right at the beginning of the design. And keep it in mind throughout the process. But also, understand the cost of security. While it’s important to prevent hacks, the amount of dollars and resources spent on security must be part of an intelligent business decision. To understand better what that means, check out my interview with Dr. Andreas Kuehlmann, the Executive Chairman and Interim CEO at Tortuga Logic in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

My definition of Industry 5.0 has to do with putting people and robots into the same environment, and having them work and operate together, safely and securely. How we get to that point is still a matter of contention. For a better understanding of what it means and how we get there, I talked to Sameer Wasson, the Vice President and Business Unit Manager for Texas Instruments’ processor business in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

Standards abound in the world of the IoT. There are standards organizations, some ad-hoc, some with some real muscle behind them. That is certainly the case when it comes to security for the IoT. But what if you’re designing to “open standards?” That’s something that crossed my desk recently, and to be honest, I wasn’t sure what it meant, so I decided to go to the source of that phrase, Marcin Nagy, the Product Director for IoT at AVSystem. In this week’s Embedded Executives podcast, I had Marcin explain what is meant by open standards, and then how it effects the embedded design community.

Higher voltages and higher frequencies are becoming commonplace in embedded designs. That in itself doesn’t necessarily cause an issue. But when you add in that packages continue to shrink in size, you have the potential for detrimental heat and airflow issues. How do you deal with that? That’s where the discussion started with Dr. Phil Lessner, the Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, at KEMET. He had lots of advice for system designers in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

Cellular IoT is one way of connecting our devices. But is it the best way? I could make a really good argument why it’s not, and I actually tried to do that in my discussion with Dima Feldman, the Vice President of Product Management at Altair Semiconductor, now a Sony Group Company. In this week’s Embedded Executives podcast., Dima explained how it works and where it makes the most sense.

There are a lot of adjectives that you can use to describe a smart home: cool, useful, efficient, safe, etc. However, you also have to add “complex” to your list, because getting these smart devices to work and (gulp) interoperate, well that’s a different story. That’s where Connected Home over IP Alliance (CHIP) comes into play. In theory—and I’m told in practice as well—if any device is CHIP compliant, you simply plug it in and it works.

If you look at the list of collaborators, you have to believe that this standard will stick. It includes Amazon, Apple, Google, and the Zigbee Alliance. To describe what the standard is and how it works, I spoke to Steve Hanna, a multi-hatted engineer. Steve is a Senior Principal at Infineon Technologies, Co-Chair of the Embedded Systems Work Group in the Trusted Computing Group (TCG), and he is my guest on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

Did you know there were standards established for wireless charging? In fact, they’re up to Rev. 2.0 of the standard. This was news to me. Stephen Rizzone, the President and Chief Executive Officer of Energous Corp. joined me to fill in the gaps, which in my case, were fairly wide. With the new spec, the distance the device can be from the charger is now measured in feet. Hear more in to this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

Yay! Another wireless standard. That’s just what we need, because the landscape isn’t already crowded enough. Do I sound cynical? Maybe. It depends on your perspective. WiFi HaLow is a WiFi-like standard that comes with its own set of benefits. I’ll let you decide whether there’s a place for another wireless standard after you listen to this week’s Embedded Executives podcast with Vahid Manian, Chief Operating Officer of Morse Micro.

The company formerly known as National Instruments is known simply as NI. Is that a big deal? Maybe, depending on who you ask. So I asked Carla Piñeyro Sublett, NI’s Chief Marketing Officer and General Manager of the company’s Portfolio Business. As expected, there’s far more to it than a simple name change. Tune in to this week’s Embedded Executives podcast to learn what it actually means.

We love our crystal balls, especially as we get into the later part of the year. I can make all the predictions I want, but my job doesn’t typically depend on whether my predictions are accurate. That’s not the case with product management folks, such as Ellen Boehm, who is the Senior Director of IoT Product Management for Keyfactor. Ellen has to determine what markets are going to be hot and why when it comes to IoT. I ask her to share of those details on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

I think it’s awesome when some of the bigger vendors in our space help fund start-ups. One example of that is Maxim Ventures, an arm of Maxim Integrated. The investment group is funding a bunch of startups in the medical space. You go into these things knowing that some of your investments are going to pay off and some aren’t. But if you pick a big-time winner, it can pay off in spades. Maxim Ventures has already seen some level of success, as Chris Neil, a Senior Vice President of Maxim Ventures, explains in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

Living at the Edge can be tricky. That’s the Edge of the IoT that I’m referring to. When you’re one of the leading providers of microprocessors, as NXP clearly is, you have lots of questions that must be addressed. Two big ones concern security and AI. In this week’s Embedded Executives podcast, I spoke to NXP’s Ron Martino, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Business Line Edge Processing, to see hear the company’s responses to those important questions.

RISC-V gets a lot of attention as an open-source ISA. Is that attention warranted? The answer, unfortunately, is that it depends. It depends on what problem you’re trying to solve, your familiarity with the tools, your design window, and your engineering talent. The aspect I wanted to confirm was whether the ecosystem is ready for prime time, because as you know, no matter how great your silicon is, if you can’t program it, you’re not going to get very far. 

One IC vendor that’s sticking his proverbial neck out in the RISC-V space is GigaDevice. The company is betting that the tools are ready and they’re better than “good enough.” That was opined by Reuben Townsend, a European FAE for GigaDevice in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

Software is becoming the new firmware. If you believe that, as Bob Scaccia, President and CEO of USA Firmware does, we are at the beginning of a new era, and we had better be prepared for it. What the heck does all that mean? To understand it better, I asked Bob to be my guest on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

AI at the Edge is now in vogue. But it presents a fundamental problem in that higher compute performance is needed, yet there are many constraints at the Edge, including size, weight, power, and cost. Each of those constraints presents its own unique problem. To understand how to design at the Edge, I spoke to Steven Wu, Vice President of the Research and Development Center at DFI in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

I think the embedded industry and its associated technology is very cool. Call me a geek if you must. But every once in a while, I come across a technology that takes “cool” to a completely different level. That occurred this week when I interviewed Florian Bohn, the Co-Founder and CEO of GuRu Wireless. The company is close to commercializing wireless charging, where the charging is done at a distance of a few feet. Check out this week’s Embedded Executives podcast and let me know if you agree with the cool factor.

Synaptics just made a hefty acquisition if you’re a player or follower of the IoT space. The company acquired the Wireless Connectivity division of Broadcom. To understand what that means and how it can affect the embedded space, I invited Vineet Ganju, a Vice President at Synaptics as my guest on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast. The biggest takeaway for me is that this space is about to get a little more interesting.

SECO USA does not produce ventilators. However, its customers do. As a result, SECO USA forged a partnership to produce, manufacture, and donate those ventilators to needy hospitals in the US. It’s great to see things like this, when so many people are in need during the COVID-19 pandemic. As Greg Nicoloso, the CEO of SECO USA explained, the company doesn’t want to be a medical-device supplier, but they do want to be a supplier to the companies that supply medical devices. Greg does a great job of explaining all of this on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

The Wi-SUN Alliance has been around for nearly a decade. The group was formed to develop testing and certification standards for connecting to IoT networks. It has its own wireless spec, which may or may not be confusing, depending on who you are and who you’re talking to. To eliminate the confusion for me and our readers, I interviewed Phil Beecher, President of the Wi-SUN Alliance in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast. Thankfully, he set me straight.

The goal of the Embedded Executives podcast is to educate our readers about the issues that are of concern to a design engineer/developer. One executive that’s seen just about every situation a developer might encounter is Rory Dear, the Managing Director of DSL. As such, I ran through a litany of issues with Rory, getting his opinion on everything from NRE to open source.

5G requires more radios. Playing devil’s advocate, does that mean there are many more points of failure? Seems obvious, doesn’t it? That’s what I asked Piyush Sevalia, an Executive Vice President at SiTime, who joined me for this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

Tracing of products is an important function. It can be used for everything from property loss to food and medicine whereabouts, and lots of stuff in between. Another interesting application for tracing, especially in our new normal, is knowing when people are practicing social distancing. Wiser Systems specializes in tracing, so I wondered whether its technology could be used to track people. That’s where the conversation started with Logan Maxwell, the company’s Director of Technical Sales in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

There is an explosion of data, thanks to COVID-19. I heard that recently, and it surprised me. I could not understand the relationship between the two, so I went to someone who has to deal with that huge increase, Virtium. My guest on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast is Jacques Issa, a Senior Vice President at the company. And once he explained it to me, it was somewhat of a “Duh!” moment.

Different vendors are doing different things to cope with the COVID-19 pandemic. Many of them are doing their part to help get us through this awful time. One of those is SiFive, a fabless semiconductor company specializing in the RISC-V instruction set architecture. Hear what they are doing to help society in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

The LoRa Alliance is a fairly dynamic organization, as projects appear to be progressing nicely. The organization began with just a handful of vendors and has now grown to more than 500. To that end, Dave Kjendal, CTO and Executive Vice President of Engineering at Senet, has just joined the Alliance’s Board of Directors. It seemed like a good time to speak to Dave to hear what his ideas and direction are for the Alliance. Dave is my guest on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

If you’ve been in the industry for a while, you likely know that we continually oscillate between more compute power at the edge and a more centralized computer. Is there a valid reason for that? That’s the question I asked of Kristin Russell, President of Global Services at Arrow Electronics in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

Many pundits say that the key to neutralizing the COVID-19 virus is testing, lots of testing. That’s easier said than done, unless you believe what the technology experts at SensiML are saying. 

They claim that with enough data in hand, they can tell you whether you have the infection simply by coughing into a microphone. And the test should produce results that are about 90% accurate. Wow! To be clear, this does not meet the requirements of a clinical tool, but it’s a fantastic start.

When I heard about this, I knew I had to hear more, so I dialed up SensiML’s CEO, Chris Rogers, who explained exactly how it works in our Special Edition of the Embedded Executive podcasts.

The AMPERE Project is a three-year initiative run out of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center. It’s being done by a combination of universities and industry. The goal is to ensure that embedded systems are being maximized, using the technology that’s typically employed by today’s supercomputers. To help our audience understand exactly what this is all about, and what they should know about it, I spoke to Eduardo Quinones, a senior researcher at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast. Eduardo is a key participant in the AMPERE Project.

In our Special Edition of the Embedded Executive podcasts, we are interviewing execs to see how their engineering teams are dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic. We are looking at companies in different parts of the world, and big companies and small companies. In this interview with Sasha Wolloch, President of Raltron Electronics, we get a peek at how it’s going in my home state of Florida.

Moore’s Law has been around for a long time—around 50 years. It says that transistor count will double every 18 months. Many “experts” have predicted that it is coming to an end. Some of those predictions have already proven false. But what’s the real answer: when will it end? That’s the basis of this week’s Embedded Executives podcast, where I speak to Thomas Smelker, the Vice President and General Manager of Custom Microelectronics Solutions at Mercury Systems.

It’s very clear that different parts of the country and the world are dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic in different ways. That’s mostly dictated by local governments and the severity of the pandemic in a given area. In this Special COVID-19 Edition of Embedded Executive, I spoke to someone who lives and works in eastern Pennsylvania, that being Bryan Muzyka, a Manager at Advanced Cooling Technologies (ACT). This is an area that is less affected than others, but nonetheless, the company is doing its part to keep its employees safe.

Device security is a key concern for everyone from developers to end-product suppliers to end users. Sometimes it takes some extreme measure to ensure the security of your device. Those extremes include quantum-safe cryptographic solutions, which is what is provided by PQ Secure, a relatively new company. In this week’s Embedded Executives podcast, I spoke to Reza Azarderakhsh, President of PQ Secure and he explained to me how this technology works and why it’s necessary in our current environment.

Security has stepped up in some areas. But that’s not good enough—it has to step up in all areas. That couldn’t be any more important than it is today as we try to get through this terrible period that’s dominated by COVID-19. In light of that, I asked Louis Parks, the CEO of Veridify Security what need to happen to really lock down our systems. Check out this week’s Embedded Executive podcast.

During this pandemic, most people are focused on the U.S., or more likely, their own specific region of the country. But pandemic by definition means something that’s global. I decided to check in with a different part of the world. In this Special COVID-19 Edition of Embedded Executive, I spoke to Stefan Skarin, the CEO of IAR Systems, who lives and works in Sweden.

Mergers and acquisitions are a way of life in the embedded, semiconductor, and electronics industries. The current pandemic has altered that trajectory somewhat, but not as much as you might expect. Business is going on and, thankfully, there’s no end in sight. Such concepts were the topics of discussion in this week’s Embedded Executive podcast, where I interviewed Syed Alam, who is the Managing Director of Strategy and Consulting at Accenture.

Different parts of the country and the world have been hit in different ways by the COVID-19 pandemic. In our Special Edition of the Embedded Executive podcasts, we are trying to understand how different groups are dealing with the issue, strictly from a work/engineering perspective. In this interview, I spoke with Thomas Fowler, Vice President of Central Engineering at Silicon Labs. Fowler is based in Austin, TX.

Open source is pretty close to “the norm” today. Aside from the military and a few other applications, developers don’t think twice about pulling down some open-source code and inserting it into their design. Is that a good thing? That’s the question I asked of Gurjot Singh, CEO of Lynx Software in this week’s Embedded Executive podcast.

We are still in the thick of the COVID-19 pandemic. Nobody knows that better than the folks in the Seattle area, one of the first hot spots in the U.S. Anthony Ambrose, President and CEO of Data I/O is based in Redmond, Wash., so he, along with the majority of his employees, have been dealing with issues like work-from-home for quite some time. While it’s far from ideal, the company has learned to operate in this manner. Check out this Special Edition Embedded Executives podcast to hear how they are doing that.

Decentralized power is a phenomenon that’s starting to hit the automotive sector. Is it better to have lower power levels in more places in the car, as opposed to one centralized place? Hmm, I’m not sure, as I think I can make a pretty argument for either solution. Rather than attempt a guess, I went right to an expert for this week’s Embedded Executives podcast. That expert is Patrick Wadden, Vicor's Global Vice President of Automotive Business Development. He explains which is the better approach and why.

In our Special Edition of the Embedded Executive podcasts, we are interviewing execs to see how they are dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic, only from an engineering workforce perspective (we’ll leave the politics to others). This edition is with a CEO who is smack in the middle of the US’s worst hotspot, New York City. Sendyne CEO John Milios describes what it’s like handling his engineering team.

The COVID-19 pandemic obviously hits different people in different ways, depending on a host of factors, which have all been discussed at length (and then some and then some) by the mainstream media. Here at Embedded Computing Design, we’re trying to understand how it has affected the engineering community solely from a work perspective. To that end, we will be conducting interviews with our Embedded Executives to see how they and their design teams are coping with the “new normal.” Today, I spoke with Todd DeBonis, President and CEO of Pixelworks. Like just about everyone I plan to speak to, his issues are both unique and similar.

The Internet of Secure Things Alliance (IoXT) is pushing a common (and obvious) goal for our industry. They want to keep all of our connected devices secure. How do they do that, who belongs to the Alliance, and what does the future hold? These are the questions I asked of David Kleidermacher in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast. David sits on the Alliance’s Board, and is also the Vice President of Engineering and Head of Android Security and Privacy at Google.

We are in the midst of a global pandemic thanks to COVID-19, aka Coronavirus. It’s turned people’s lives completely upside down. But engineers and developers, like many people, still have jobs to do. How that gets done in this time of social distancing is interesting at best. I discussed this issue with Rob Oshana, Vice President of Software R&D for Edge Processing, NXP in this week’s Special Edition of the Embedded Executives podcast.

Reliability is a subjective feature of a product. And we’ve come to accept certain levels for products that are frankly, below what they should be. One example is waterproofing. The technology is available today to protect our products, but for various reasons, we give in to sub-par products. In this week’s week’s Embedded Executives podcast, I discuss this topic with Stephen Gold, the Chief Commercial Officer for HZO.

Inferencing is a hot topic. Let’s start with “what is inferencing?” Then, how do you benchmark inferencing? That’s the topic du jour in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast, with guest Geoff Tate is CEO and co-founder of Flex Logic. We also get into whether some vendors are trying to rig the system.

Test tools can be expensive; in some case, very expensive. But if your needs don’t extend to the leading edge, you may find that there are some much lower cost tools available. That’s an area that Digilent specializes in. And according to Steve Johnson, Digilent’s President and General Manager in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast, you may be surprised that most of your needs will be covered.

Security has been top of mind for a long time, long enough that someone should be doing something about it. Most experts will tell you that the industry is doing something about it, and more than just something. In this week’s Embedded Executives podcast, I discussed this topic with Mike Nicholson, Embedded Software/Systems Architect, MultiTech. While chatting, Mike revealed that MultiTech is sponsoring a Hackathon, where they are encouraging the community to into the company’s latest IoT development gateway product, the Conduit 300. Anyone that’s able to hack in will win some big prizes.

Everyone wants their personal device to run longer on a charge. While many of the processor vendors have made incremental improvements, Ambiq Micro seems to have turned the equation on its head, running at performance levels that are more than adequate, but consume far less power. Coming on as a repeat guest of our Embedded Executives podcast to provide an update on the technology is Scott Hanson, Founder and CTO of Ambiq Micro.

Yup, 5G is still two or three quarters away. Have you heard that before? I know I have. But more importantly, when will it become mainstream in the industrial sector, where things tend to take far longer, for good reasons. This is the first of many questions I asked of Harald Remmert, the Senior Director of Research and Innovation at Digi International in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

The electrification of the automobile is an amazing phenomenon. Things that were in the super luxury cars a few years ago are now mainstream. To understand what’s next in the automobile, I had a conversation with Joseph Notaro the Vice President of Worldwide Automotive Strategy and Business Development for On Semiconductor in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

MultiTech is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year. That’s quite an achievement in our space, where vendors so often get swallowed up by larger vendors or they simply go away. I had the opportunity to discuss this milestone with Matt Sharma, whose dad started the company 50 years ago. In this week’s Embedded Executives podcast, Matt and I discussed what it takes to keep a company vibrant for such a long time.

Like the case with many software products, there are a host of free design tools available for things like GUI development. Crank Software is one vendor that sells such tools. So the obvious question for me was, why should I pay for tools if I can get them for free? This was the first of many questions I asked of Jason Clarke, the founder and vice president of Crank Software in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

Open control systems and open architectures aren’t the mainstream in the industrial sector, but maybe they should be. That’s the opinion of Yuri Chamarelli, a Lead Product Specialist at Phoenix Contact in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast. Hear the reasons why, and see if you agree.

We can talk about embedded security until we’re blue in the face. At some point, the developer has to step up and take charge of the situation. In this week’s Embedded Executives podcast, I interviewed Frédéric Thomas, the Vice President of Technology for Kudelski IoT. We started by looking at the holes in the security infrastructure, and went from there.

You can make a case that LoRa is the perfect medium to outfit a smart building. It may not be able to handle every task, but it can do more than you might think. To that end, I spoke with Byron BeMiller, a Vertical Marketing Director for Smart Buildings at Semtech and also Head of the LoRa Alliance’s Smart Building Working Group in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

The definition of “low power” can differ based on your application. Low power for an industrial system supplier can differ greatly from that of a medical device maker. Regardless, I think we can agree that power levels are coming down, but not at the rate that users and OEMs would like. To that end, the designers at InnoPhase have developed a power-reduction technique for wireless connection devices that’s pretty innovative. That’s where the discussion began in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast with Thomas Lee, a Vice President at InnoPhase.

Neural networks are complex. Mindtech makes tools that help create vision data sets for training these neural nets. In this week’s Embedded Executive podcast with Chris Longstaff, Vice President of Product Management at Mindtech, I discussed what an engineer would do with the data set once in-hand.

Our embedded industry is bursting with standards. One of the more popular ones, especially when discussing industrial specifications, is Industry 4.0. But, we’ve been stuck on 4.0 for quite some time. With that said, what’s next? Is it Industry 4.1? 5.0? Or something else? That’s the question I posed of someone in the know, Dusty Kramer, the recently appointed CEO of Eurotech in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

There are obvious phases of any design. You know them as well as I do, but the one that doesn’t seem to garner its share of attention is test. It could be because test is hard and not well understood. Or it could be because a percentage of engineers feel that test should be handled by the test engineers exclusively. To better understand what’s meant by this process and how it fits into the overall cycle, I spent some time with Joseph Sawicki, Executive Vice President of Mentor IC EDA, in this week’s Embedded Executive podcast.

 The power that’s required to charge electric vehicles is quite high. And when you add wireless charging, the issues grow significantly.

But what exactly are those electric vehicle charging issues, and how do we solve them? And why are people afraid to charge their batteries to 199 percent? That’s just the beginning of the discussion I had with Dr. Phil Lessner, Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer for KEMET in this week’s Embedded Executive interview.

High-performance computing has a lot to do with complex calculations performed in parallel. However, in the embedded space, it has different, and potentially more challenging, definitions. To  understand where high-performance computing fits in the industrial IoT sector, I spent this week's Embedded Executives podcast with Michael Duhamel, Vice President at SECO.

The semiconductor content in today’s (and tomorrow’s) automobiles continues to grow. That’s a good thing for lots of people. Unfortunately, that list includes the bad guys, as more end points appear in the vehicle, more entry points become vulnerable to hackers. The question I posed to this week’s Embedded Executive, Andrew Longhurst, Managing Director, Wittenstein High Integrity Systems, is simply, “what do we do about that?” Tune in to find out.  

Many people claim that analog is a dying technology. While I’m not in that camp, I want to get to the bottom of the discussion. Hence, I posed the topic to David Dwelley, a Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at Maxim Integrated. David has a birds-eye view on state-of-the-art analog design. Tune in to hear his response. 

Open source is no longer a fad or something for Makers. As Dave Hughes, the Founder and CEO of HCC Embedded says, “it is now a force in our industry.” If you’re not on the bus, it’s time to get on. To hear everything else Dave had to say about open-source software, check out this week’s Embedded Executive podcast.

Analytics is the key to having a successful IoT platform, particularly in the industrial space. However, analytics doesn’t seem to have the focus in the development community that it should. Why is that so? That’s what I asked Tom Yates, Vice President of Products at Nubix, who deals with this topic on a daily basis. Tune in for more. 

We seem to be on a never-ending ride to reduce power. It seems like whatever the IC vendors can provide, the OEMs want more (or in this case, less). Is that fair? Maybe. Will the cycle continue down a similar path? Probably, but to know for sure, I interviewed Larry Blackledge, General Manager of Qorvo's Programmable Power Management business to see how low we can go. Tune in for more.

5G is coming. 5G is here. 5G is the greatest thing since sliced bread. There is so much information and misinformation regarding 5G that I thought it made sense to bring on an expert who could debunk some of the myths around 5G. In this week’s Embedded Executive interview, I spoke with Sylvia Lu, who is the Senior 5G Technical Lead for 5G at u-blox, as well as a member of the UK5G Advisory Board. Tune in for more. 

Yunsup Lee was part of the RISC-V movement from the ground floor. He was one of the original authors of the spec right from Day 1. Currently, Lee is the CTO of SiFive, one of the leaders in terms of RISC-V IP. But this Five Minutes With…discussion revolves around the Chips Alliance, where Lee is a Board Member. The Alliance has a goal of developing open-source hardware, which dovetails perfectly with the motivation behind RISC-V. Tune in for more. 

IoT is evolving. We’ve added components like AI and machine learning, more complex Edge nodes, and so on. Hence, I thought the time was right to speak to someone in the cat bird’s seat about what designers can expect in the IoT space over the next few years. That “someone” was Cliff Ortmeyer, Head of Technical Marketing, Newark, who was my guest on this week’s Five Minutes With…discussion.

Engineers have been designing PCBs for a long time. As components get smaller and more integrated, and a frequencies increase, the complexities increase exponentially. The tools are generally keeping pace, but that doesn’t make them any easier to use. In this week’s Five Minutes With…podcast, I spoke to Lawrence Romine, a vice president of Altium, one of the leaders in PCB design. We also chatted briefly about the company’s annual conference, Altium Live, that teaches designers the ins and outs of PCB design.

When you can use your “powers” for the good of society, that’s a great thing. I came across a story that described a bus for handicapped people that took advantage of AI technology. It’s really cool; so cool in fact, that it requires two guests on my weekly Five Minutes With…podcast, the first time we’ve ever done that. Check out my discussion with Joe Speed, Field CTO of ADLINK’s IoT Solutions & Technology Group and Mohamed Elwazer, Technical Founder & CEO of linedanceAI.

There’s a lot going on at the Linux Foundation, including the announcement that we discussed last week that had to do with new features and ecosystem partners joining the open-source software and tools fray with LF Edge. So it seemed appropriate to take a deeper dive into the Foundation, which is what I did with Arpit Joshipura, the General Manager for Networking, Edge & IoT at the Linux Foundation in this week’s Five Minutes With…discussion.

LF Edge is an umbrella organization operating within the Linux Foundation. The group recently made an important announcement around open-source software and tools. The announcement has to do with a new release that adds a lot of new features and new ecosystem partners joining the fray. The bottom line is that the technology is now ready for prime time. To get more detail, check out this week’s Five Minutes With…discussion with Jason Shepherd, a member of the LF Edge Governing Board and also the IoT and Edge Computing CTO for Dell Technologies.

If you use cellular for your positioning and 5G is finally coming, you’re likely in a good position. To determine whether that’s actually the case, I spoke to Ed Chao, the CEO of Polte in this week’s Five Minutes With…discussion. Ed explained how and why that is the case, using lots of easy-to-digest examples.

5G is going to revolutionize the world. Well, maybe it’ll revolutionize how we handle communications. However, it needs to be rolled out. Is that ever going to happen? Probably, but when? That’s where I started in this week’s Five Minutes With…discussion with Kailash Narayanan, a Vice President and General Manager of the Wireless Devices Segment at Keysight Technologies.

Embedded developers need to protect their systems after they are deployed. That’s not always easy to do, as you sometimes don’t know exactly where deployment is taking place. So, what to do? That’s the question I asked of Alan Grau, the Vice President of IoT and Embedded Solutions for Sectigo in this week’s Five Minutes With…discussion.

Industrial robots have been used for automotive assembly for quite some time. Now, they are expanding their use into just about any industrial application you can think of, and they’ll be including the use of AI in those robots. Where does the AI come in and how does it work? Those are the first questions I asked Kai Wang, a Director on NexCOBOT’s Robot and Automation team in this week’s Five Minutes With…discussion.

Machine learning isn’t yet mainstream, but it’s getting there. One example of that is how it’s affecting the automotive space. To understand how that works, I invited Ricardo Margalho, the Co-founder and CEO of Stratio Automotive, to join me in this week’s Five Minutes With…discussion. How they handle that technology is quite interesting and it’s easy to see how it can evolve and expand. Tune in for more. 

Zephyr is an open-source operating system that’s designed for applications where Linux is simply too big, from a space or power perspective. Is Zephyr right for your application? How would you even know? And if it is, where do you start?

These are just some of the questions I threw at Kate Stewart, a Senior Director of Strategic Programs for the Linux Foundation, the governing body of Zephyr in this week’s Five Minutes With…discussion.

Zvonimir Bandic wears lots of hats. He is the Senior Director of Hardware Platforms for Western Digital; he’s a Member of the Board of Directors for the RISC-V Foundation, and he’s the Chairman of the Chips Alliance. It’s that latter capacity that we discussed in this week’s Five Minutes With…discussion. The organization focuses on things like open source hardware, software tools, RTL development, and related topics. They will be holding their inaugural workshop in just a few weeks, so it was timely to understand the purpose of the Alliance. And now I do, as will you.

We now have the capability to implement super-specific GPS, far more accurate than what we’re accustomed to today. But do we really need to know exactly where we are, within centimeters, or is the current technology good enough? And assuming you picked the former, how do you actually do that? Those are just some of the questions I asked of Yang Zhao, the CEO of ACEINNA, in this week’s Five Minutes With…discussion.

RISC-V is the new instruction-set architecture that people can use to design microprocessors. Calista Redmond is the newly appointed CEO of the RISC-V Foundation, the group that manages the spec and is putting on seminars and conferences around the world. In this week’s Five Minutes With…discussion, I asked Calista about her plans for the organization, which potentially plays a large role in our industry moving forward.

There seems to be a foundation/association for just about everything in our space these days. Are such institutions necessary? Do they wear out their usefulness? I asked that question of Mike Milinkovich, the Executive Director of the Eclipse Foundation. Of course, he defended his group, but his reasoning was quite interesting. Check out this week’s Five Minutes With…discussion.