Moore’s Lobby: Where engineers talk all about circuits

Matthias Wagner learned early in his career that not everything is like an engineering “marketing video…all so streamlined and perfect.” Sometimes you have to dive into a project with no documentation and no roadmap and “figure it out now.” That fearless, can-do attitude has led him on a circuitous and amazing route into, out of, and now back into the electronics world where he is leading Flux as they try to remake the PCB design flow. 

While others have previously tried and failed, Wagner recognized that many of these were “too small of dreams to make any meaningful change…you just need to start from scratch.”

And yeah, that's scary. And it's a lot of work, don't get me wrong, it's very hard. But then what else were you going to do with your time that was worthwhile?

One of Wagner’s career pivots was out of the electronics industry and into the music industry. In this fascinating interview, Wagner reflects on that decision and states, “that was a really dumb idea at the time, but I made it work.” And, boy, did he ever! During his foray into the music industry, Wagner’s work sold over 1 billion units across the globe and was honored with platinum and gold records. His song, Axel F by Crazy Frog, has nearly 3.8 billion (yes, billion with a b) views on YouTube.

And we haven’t even mentioned his experiences developing energy systems for Burning Man that then lead to working at Facebook on products with billions of users. You will just have to listen to hear about those. And, after listening to this episode, you might be inspired to “give yourself permission to dream big dreams.”

Other highlights from this Moore’s Lobby interview with Matthias Wagner include:

-Why hardware engineers are jealous of software developers

-The competition between hard core gamers and general users when developing Oculus

-What the PCB and electronics industry can learn from developments in the music industry

-Learning how to run a business by NOT running a business

I’ll bet that you didn’t know that the original concept for what became the Apple Thunderbolt interface involved optical communication. Well, in this fascinating podcast with Dr. Mader, you will learn that intriguing backstory and much more. 

Mader also provides a helpful introduction to silicon photonics technology and applications. Importantly, OpenLight’s business model is designed to allow them to become an Arm-like IP provider for silicon photonics. “We’re the first open siliconics platform that has the lasers and amplifiers integrated on the chip,” explains Mader.

With the OpenLight Process Design Kit (PDK), customers can integrate InP lasers and amplifiers directly into their silicon IC designs at Tower Semiconductor. While the silicon can be  employed to guide, modulate, and detect light, you need the InP to amplify. OpenLight literally brings the silicon and the InP together with molecular bonding.

While silicon photonic is already making inroads in a number of important applications, Mader is “excited about the long tail of applications” enabled by OpenLight and their customers.

In addition, Mader recounts his rich technology background that includes developing a patent while interning at Apple, being involved in an early Amazon commercial product, directing engineering at a startup that was inquired by Intel, and his family connections to the legendary Fairchild Semiconductor and our podcast’s name inspiration, Gordon Moore.

So, listen in for other interesting tidbits from this discussion with Mader, including these technical insights: 

-A clear description of a silicon photonics system -What makes a quality integrated laser? -How amplitude modulation (AM) and phase modulation (PM) are employed is laser systems

“It’s a magical world.” After several decades in the chip design industry, Stelios Diamantidis might be just as fascinated by the work he gets to do today as when he saw his first computer as a child growing up in Greece.

Inspired by the success of computers and AI systems in defeating humans in strategy games like chess and Go, Diamantidis wondered, “what if we were to one day be able to treat chip design as a game, a very complex game?” Armed with that question, Diamantidis and his Synopsys colleagues got to work.

Eventually, that led to their DSO.ai (design space optimization using AI) product. As Diamantidis explains in the interview, they started on smaller challenges in the IC design flow and have expanded over the past few years. “I'm extremely excited that this…technology has provided a framework for all of them, no exceptions so far, to actually come up with great solutions.”

When discussing IC design optimization, Dimantidis states, “everybody has their own definition of the problem.” CPU designers want to optimize speed, GPU designers are focused on reducing energy consumption, and flash memory designers “are very paranoid about size because they're going to manufacture tens or hundreds of millions of units.” 

In this Moore’s Lobby interview with host Daniel Bogdanoff, Diamantidis shares his experiences at an early pioneering tech company working with “some of the most remarkable folks I’ve ever met” while solving problems that were “the stuff of science fiction.” He also shares insights from founding two different EDA technology companies of his own.

Here are a few other interesting stories and anecdotes from this fascinating interview with Diamantidis: 

-How some life decisions come down to snow versus palm trees

-About how budding computer programmers in Greece used to share their code through a print magazine—our younger audience might find that hard to believe

-What Jurassic Park, US President Bill Clinton, and Stelios’ early dreams have in common

-It’s not really what you miss, but what you don't know you miss

There is much more, so go listen for yourself! 

Fern Yoon always enjoyed learning how things work. However, like many, or even most, electrical engineers, she grew up with a very limited understanding of the profession. Even through college, she still had a narrow understanding of what engineers actually do on the job. (Hmm…maybe this is why attracting people to engineering careers is difficult?).

After beginning her career with Texas Instruments as a thin film process engineering intern, Fern had the opportunity to go on a job rotation where she could see there were “a lot of different roles that existed that I honestly didn't realize.” This experience opened her eyes to a new world of possibilities and find her true satisfaction in working with customers and being able to take in the big picture. 

Fern’s excitement comes across as she discusses working as a fab engineer, helping build a ruggedized laptop, and in her current position working on vehicle electrification. 

When I started working in automotive ten-plus years ago, cars had a big emphasis on sustainability, emissions, and of course, reliability. Fast forward ten years, the cars are starting to look like a supercomputer on wheels.

In her 15 years at TI, Fern has steadily worked her way up the ranks and learned a lot of valuable lessons about working in teams, collaborating with customers, and charting your career path. In this second episode of All About Circuits’ coverage of women in engineering month, Fern provides interesting insights and anecdotes that you will not want to miss, including: -How vehicle electrification is probably impacting more in our cars than you imagine -Why electrical engineering was “the lesser of four evils” -Her best advice to engineers -Why you shouldn’t be afraid to learn that you don’t like something

Beginning with her humble roots in Delhi, India, Deepali Trehan recounts her story of overcoming the odds to become a leader at one of the most respected technology companies in the world. Encouraged, supported, and even challenged by her family and influential teachers along the way, Trehan’s remarkable journey is an inspiration for everyone from students thinking about engineering to teachers, leaders, and mentors looking to invest their time and energy into others.

How can I build the mindset of embracing and learning from failures and setbacks and build that resilience? It's never a story of how you became successful. It's always a story of how many times you failed, and what did you learn from those failures to get to where you are today? 

On the technology side, Trehan provides insights on several of the latest hardware advancements in Intel’s Agilex FPGAs, structured ASICs, AI, and chiplets. She discusses how the latest technologies are increasing performance per watt by 2X over competing technologies as power consumption is becoming as important as execution speed.   

We are thrilled that this episode is part of All About Circuits’ coverage of women in engineering month. Yet, the advice and encouragement Trehan provides is valuable to everyone. 

Listen in as she provides insights on:

-Pushing the boundaries of your role when needed. -Never allowing anybody to write a job description that could limit you. Go write your own! -“Confidence is not, ‘I know it all.’ Confidence is”...well, you will just have to listen to the episode to find out!

Other highlights from this amazing interview with Deepali Treehan include:

-Why you're never going to be 100% ready to take on the next role. -How to expect and embrace surprises, even knowing that some will be fun and great, while others will not. -The three sets of questions that help keep her and her team focused on the right things.

Season 6 of Moore's Lobby brings you new conversations with some of the most fascinating leaders in the electronics industry. 

Join host Daniel Bogdanoff as he dives deep with engineers, inventors, executives, and more about the hottest trends and most interesting technologies that are shaping our future. 

Duncan Haldane has always approached problems a little differently. In high school, he scavenged auto parts to build robots. In college, Haldane was mimicking biology to create two Guinness world-record robots: the speedy, slightly disturbing X2-VelociRoACH (video) and the crazy, jumping Salto (video).

Now he is leading JITX as it builds a new design flow process to automate circuit board design. 

I think the motivation is, how do you take the best of how we as a species know how to design hardware and apply it to every single design? How do you make the world's most expert knowledge reusable, repeatable, scalable, in the way that software is?

They generate designs with code rather than schematics and use AI to help automate the flow and improve rule checking.

According to Haldane, JITX software is targeted at senior engineers to make them more productive. The goal is to automate routine tasks like pin assignments, design checks, and even help users’ identify suitable parts that are in stock at distributors. 

Haldane recounts how they began designing for customers using early versions of their tool and kept improving by “noticing what didn't work and what was really bad.” He added that they are “making a tool for experts,” so it must “meaningfully help them very quickly, or it's not worth anything at all.”

Other highlights from this Moore’s Lobby interview of Duncan Haldane include:

-Why “robots suck pretty bad as compared to animals”

- How simple errors in mass distribution calculations can result in robots that “spin like a maniac”

- Discussion of the data challenges that circuit and PCB designers still face

- Advice for tech entrepreneurs who are pursuing venture funding

Like most engineers, Michael Armstrong was first inspired by his high school English class…Wait, that can’t be right? Indeed it is! Since then, Armstrong’s career has taken numerous unexpected twists and turns that include pistachios, designing a PhD program on a napkin, and becoming an unintentional Disney Imagineer.

Armstrong got involved in electric aviation long before it was made cool by Uber (yes, Uber). During his distinguished career, he has worked with many company names that we would associate with aviation, including NASA and Rolls-Royce. Armstrong has long been asking the questions: “What does the next aircraft of the future really look like? And, how do technologies like electrification change the way you think about what a good aircraft looks like?”

And now, he is leading efforts to create high voltage, high power, high-reliability battery systems for electric aircraft propulsion. This includes a current program to complete the first flight certification of a battery that will propel the all-electric Diamond Aircraft eDA40. 

The technology is amazing, but Armstrong’s stated goal is for “the battery to be the most boring system on the plane.” And that drives his focus on safety and reliability.

Drawing from his career working on electric aviation from full systems down to batteries, Armstrong provides interesting insights on battery technology, electric aviation, and even deciding upon an engineering career path. You will not want to miss this fascinating Moore’s Lobby episode as he discusses:

-How electric propulsion will allow designers to complete reimagine aircraft

-The massively different challenges presented by electric aviation when compared to electric vehicles

-Working on multiple NASA X-plane programs, including the flying harmonica

-Why after delivering a battery, “in some ways your job has just begun.”

In this Industry Tech Days 2022 keynote panel discussion, we get to hear from three industry leaders: 

- Michael Knight, President of the Exponential Technology Group and Senior VP of Corporate Business Development at TTI.

- Jeff Newell, Senior VP of Products at electronics distributor Mouser Electronics.

- Misha Govshteyn, CEO of MacroFab, a contract manufacturing company serving the electronics industry.

You don’t thrive in the turmoil of the electronics industry without seeing challenges as opportunities. This is evident throughout this discussion. Misha Govshteyn demonstrated this attitude as he reflected on the last couple of years:

It's messy, but I got to be honest with you. I love It. We're in wartime mode, and I think we're trying to build a very different model for how to build product and how to do manufacturing. Believe it or not, it's actually very difficult to do without a crisis.

Jeff Newell also has a lot of positive things to say about the unique opportunities of our current situation, including:

If you give the engineers time to really think and create versus having to go to meetings and some of the overhead things associated with working in an office environment, I think we're going to see a lot of cool things come out of that environment…I think the number of new products is going to accelerate as we get through the next few years. If I were an engineer in today's world, I'd be very excited about that.

This is a spirited discussion, and everyone from executives to engineers and students can learn something from it. Our Moore’s Lobby host, Daniel Bogdanoff, leads a discussion that includes:

- Gray and black market products and their relation to e-waste

- Component engineers? What are they and why your company might need them

- Why EE hardware engineers might be undervalued in the market

- Advice for early career and student engineers

Wei has always been at the cutting edge of hardware and software as Intel transformed from a PC-based hardware company to a world leader in data centers, cloud, mobile, and now AI solutions. 

He spearheaded compiler development that set world records for performance on parallel servers and supercomputers. How impressive are his accomplishments at Intel? Wei and his teams have received not one, not two, but FIVE of the prestigious Intel Achievement Awards. Perhaps more importantly, Wei always seems to be having fun, even if he might be “stuck in the Matrix.”

In this Moore’s Lobby episode, Wei provides his insights on hardware and software co-design, AI reference kits, and advances in CPUs and GPUs. You will enjoy this interview with host Daniel Bogdanoff as they discuss not only AI, but also:

- Hardware is an accelerator for software. “It's not the other way around. It's not!” 

- Why Wei and Intel are encouraging and investing in the AI open-source movement

- Wei’s three key pieces of advice for early-stage engineers or students

Starting his engineering education by taking classes at Caltech under Carver Mead, one of “one of the luminaries of computer VLSI design,” Sam Naffziger “really got excited about the VLSI design field” early in his career. That excitement hasn’t waned a bit as he continues to tackle important challenges in low-power circuit and system design. 

Low-power design techniques like boost and adaptive clocking were brand new in the early 2000s, and not much interest to teams focused almost solely on performance. So, Sam had to sneak some of those low-power features into early designs:

There was another engineer who had a little tiny little microcontroller for other functions to manage the I/O interfaces, and so I managed to get a backdoor path into that microcontroller and some code space so we could actually sneak in, so that the design leads didn't actually know we had this back door.

And the rest, as the saying goes, is history:

So we got this stuff in there, and it proves so valuable…that suddenly it became an essential element for all future processors.

So valuable that it is now used in everything from smartphones to desktop PCs and the latest supercomputers.

Naffziger has had such a fascinating career in the integrated circuit world that you will not want to miss a minute of this Moore’s Lobby interview with our host Daniel Bogdanoff. Some of the other great topics in this episode are:

-Early developments of in-order and out-of-order computer architectures

-Why AMD pays attention to the overclocking community

-Is performance per watt more important than raw performance? 

-Sam’s key role in one of the most famous Caltech pranks of all time!

Zoox is designing cars with autonomy as a primary requirement from the outset. That means no drivers, no steering wheel, and no gas or brake pedals. As their motto highlights, Zoox builds cars for riders, not drivers. 

In this interesting keynote interview from Industry Tech Days 2022, Ryan McMichael of Zoox and our Moore’s Lobby host, Daniel Bogdanoff, discuss sensor systems for high-altitude balloons and next-generation autonomous vehicles.

While Ryan is having a fascinating career in engineering, his original dream was to pursue something entirely..and I mean, entirely…different in college. And even after transitioning to engineering, it was a “happy accident” that led him to specialize in optics. 

There are many other interesting tidbits in this interview that definitely make it worth a listen, including:

-How ADAS sensors now include much more than cameras and lidar these days

-Why Zoox is focusing on mobility-as-a-service

-The favorite pop culture autonomous vehicle at Zoox

In this keynote interview from Industry Tech Days 2022, we hear from two leaders at electronics industry heavyweight companies—Digi-Key and Molex. Dave Doherty is the President and COO of distributor Digi-Key Electronics while Joe Nelligan is the CEO of Molex, a leading supplier of connectors and interconnect components. Both of these gentlemen started their careers as engineers and still have an enthusiasm for and understanding of the challenges that design engineers face today.

As we think about advancements in the semiconductor world, it is typically focused on nanometer feature sizes and new transistor technologies like FinFETs and RibbonFETs. But, Steven Kosier, CTO of SkyWater points out that:

At any particular technology node, there are all sorts of other things that silicon can do to improve the world…power management efficiencies…superconducting chips…silicon photonics chips…and microfluidic chips. There are all sorts of things that you can do with the same equipment set and a little ingenuity.

In this Moore’s Lobby interview, host Daniel Bogdanoff and Steven Kosier discuss the unique challenges and opportunities available at a pure-play semiconductor fab that focuses on technology co-creation with customers that need to develop and manufacture new technologies.

In one of the most interesting sections, Steven explains how chip designers can get access to free EDA tools, download free IP libraries, and manufacture free 130nm silicon ICs in collaboration with Google and eFabless. Did I mention free? Here I will echo Steven’s comment:

There's nothing stopping you from designing a chip and changing the world with it…You can go do it right now. And it's just awesome!”

Other highlights from this engaging discussion about semiconductor technology and foundry business include:

-SkyWater’s collaboration with Purdue University to create a new innovation center for creating new technologies and educating the next generation of semiconductor engineers

-Steven’s interesting entrance into the electrical engineering world

- Why accelerated radiation testing for satellite electronics doesn’t always work

Season 5 of Moore's Lobby brings you new conversations with some of the most fascinating leaders in the electronics industry. 

Join host Daniel Bogdanoff as he geeks out with CTOs, inventors, engineers, and more about the hottest trends and most interesting technologies that are shaping our future. 

While he is currently the VP of Engineering at what is probably the largest computing company in the world, Bill Vass was not always convinced a career in computing was a good option:

My primary major was in geology, actually, because I never thought people would actually pay you just to do computers. I always thought it would be using computers for other things. So, I studied marine biology, geology, and computer science.

In this episode of Moore’s Lobby, we get to hear from one of the tech gurus at Amazon Web Services (AWS) on topics that include artificial intelligence; machine learning; portable, ruggedized, high-density storage; quantum computing; and explosions. Yes, explosions!

Other fun topics include a discussion of Bill’s view of the Metaverse. I won’t give it all away, but it is definitely more than AR/VR goggles and involves everyone’s favorite spy, 007.

After you listen to Bill explain how he graphs out his time on his calendar, you will get 

some insight into how he has forged such an amazing career. It might even get you to start graphing your own calendar and time usage! 

And, be sure to listen to the end for a truly fascinating story about how Star Trek influenced the technology we use every day.

Other highlights from this fast-paced episode include:

• Why it would be fun to visit Bill’s barn
• A 5-pound snowcone and a 50-pound snowball?
• The best engineers and coders are also…well, you will have to listen to find out how Bill completes this sentence!

Dipti Vachani fell in love with technology during her high school years when the idea of being able to write code and magically make something do what she wanted amazed her. Her programming skills, typing speed, and…...running ability?...helped her win computer science contests around the nation. This was just the beginning of a remarkable career that is still going strong.

After graduating from Texas A&M with a BS in Computer Engineering where she was the only woman in her graduating class, Dipti spent 17 years at Texas Instruments. During her time at TI, she worked on numerous projects including automotive audio systems and low-power digital signal processors. As she worked her way up to a Vice President role, Dipti also led the creation of TI’s Sitara brand of Arm microprocessors.

In this podcast, Dipti reflects fondly on that early work:

“It was fun and no day was the same. You came in and you took technology to solve problems for your customers…and when you figured it out and they were happy, it felt like joy, like you accomplished something.” 

Now, in her current role at Arm, Dipti is helping bring the automotive and IoT worlds together as they both begin “to look like a network of networks.” With IoT, Arm is looking to transform every industry including industrial, retail, home, cars, and agriculture. 

While Dipti is active in mentoring younger women in engineering, in this interview she provides important guidance for all engineers about setting boundaries in your career and knowing when it might be time to move on to another position.

Other highlights from this lively episode include:

-How corporate “frenemies” must come together to grow markets

-The important distinction between mentorship and advocacy, particularly as it relates to women in engineering

-Why Arm is the place for Vachani as she looks to leave a legacy

-The “Junk in the trunk” of automotive compute applications

When your junior high school balsa wood bridge is the envy of MIT professors, it is probably a good bet you will have a distinguished engineering career. Argo AI’s VP of Firmware and Hardware Zach Little knew from a pretty early age that he wanted to work in technology. But not even he could have imagined the diverse set of companies he would work for.

Zach already had a fascinating career arc prior to joining Argo AI. And now he is working on advanced hardware and firmware to make fully autonomous driving a reality. In this entertaining interview with Moore’s Lobby’s Daniel Bogdanoff, Zach retraces his career path and talks about the current challenges and opportunities when building AVs in collaboration with Volkswagen and Ford. 

There are a lot of good tech discussions that you will not want to miss including single-photon lidar detection and the challenges of detecting black cars at long range. Other highlights include:

• How the west coast beckoned this midwestern young man with…free soda?
• The different challenges posed by developing AVs for both Miami and Munich
• The connection between USB keyboards and AVs
• Zach’s uncomfortable first ride in an autonomous vehicle

“I think you're going to see a world where people work side by side with robots,” says Povlsen. Collaborative robots, like those made by Universal Robots, will take care of the “3D” tasks - dull, dirty, or dangerous. This will allow people to “take on more fulfilling tasks” and use their creativity.

In this episode, Povlsen discusses the early years of Universal Robots and the ambitious goal to create collaborative robots that would be easy to install and fun to program. 

“They wanted to change that entire paradigm of how to program robots into something that pretty much anyone can do with just minimum training.”

Before joining Universal Robots, Povlsen spent some of his early years at Schneider Electric working on embedded IoT devices “where I think we could all see the great potential of connecting devices in general,” but “back then it was a pain in the neck to connect anything.” 

Povlsen’s father was an electrical engineer whose workshop was filled with interesting equipment and project. This early exposure created his passion for technology; even though his first project as a young boy was less than a success.

“I thought I could build this new fancy program and I totally failed..But, I thought it was great.” 

In this lively Moore’s Lobby interview, the charismatic Povlsen also expounds on: 

• The IKEA of cobots 
• From ship building to robotics - how a Danish community transitioned from world leadership in one industry to a completely different one
• The conceptual connection between noise-canceling headphones and better cobots
• And, why he doesn’t want to play squash with a robot

Marcus Fontoura has spent time at many of the world’s leading technology companies including IBM Research, Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft. In this episode of Moore’s Lobby, Daniel goes on a deep dive with Marcus into Microsoft’s cloud computing platform, Azure.

In this episode, they discuss the hardware, software, and infrastructure behind what Marcus considers to be the “world’s computer.” By effectively integrating both hardware and software, they are enabling other engineers and technologists to “do the science fiction work” that they dream of doing.

Fontoura’s passion for his work comes through in this lively discussion and in his goals to create technology to make our lives better. Reflecting on the immense challenges that occurred during Covid when internet traffic spiked, Fontoura considered it one of his “proudest moments:"

“This became a very challenging couple of months as we had to manage the capacity. But you know, for me it was super exciting because this was putting to the test everything that I'm talking to you about. We really have this deep knowledge of the workloads that we are running on Azure. We know how to manage, we know how to manage power efficiently…we coped brilliantly.” 

Did you know that overclocking CPUs isn’t just for gamers, but is used in Azure data centers? Fontoura explains how selective overclocking actually improves efficiency. We’ll bet you can’t guess what intense computing applications demand this overclocking! But, it will make perfect sense after you hear his explanation.

The episode touches on many other fascinating topics including:

• Ambient intelligence that will make our lives better, without being “creepy”
• “Our most efficient data centers are...” –sorry, you will have to listen to hear Fontoura finish this statement!
• Democratizing high-performance computing
• Immersion cooling
• How the combination of edge and cloud is “a beautiful vision”
• Fontoura’s view on the skills that the next generation of technologists will need to succeed

Tune in and let us know your thoughts from the episode on Moore’s Lobby Linkedin or Facebook pages. 

Chris Keimel may have dreamed of being a veterinarian, but he is undoubtedly making a bigger impact on the world through his work on micro-electromechanical systems, also known as MEMs. In this episode of Moore’s Lobby, our host, Daniel Bogdanoff, speaks with Chris about his career developing cutting-edge nanotechnology.

Chris recounts the technology development behind their Ideal Switch and the creation of Menlo Micro, a company that traces its lineage and name back to Thomas Edison, “The Wizard of Menlo Park”. The work began at General Electric’s Global Research Center, where Keimel and his co-workers were asking the question: 

“How do you reinvent the circuit breaker, something that's been in existence for decades or even a century, kind of back to the times of Thomas Edison?”

“We Were Just Blowing Them Up”

In this conversation, Chris noted that “Almost no one in their right mind would…go make a circuit breaker smaller.” Typically, if you want to put more power through a device you make it bigger and add more metal. But the GE team was “thinking outside the box…how do we reinvent this?”

As they first started testing the technology available at the time, they were definitely not successful.

“When we started pushing watts…or hundreds of watts through these relays, we were just blowing them up in the labs…Okay, this is a transformational moment. We either stop and move on to something else because this is not going to work or we dig in and we figure out why this is not working.” 

The Humble Switch and Its Impact on the World

In our increasingly electrified world, nearly everything includes a power switch. From our lights and our phones to our cars and coffee makers. Taking on big projects like this is what motivates Chris: 

“What I love about this technology is I get to have an impact on developing a technology and looking to transform a technology that we use every day…The switch is the interface between us as humans in a society.”

Both engineers and business leaders will find interesting takeaways from this fascinating conversation with Chris Keimel including:

- “We had Eureka moments every year, almost every month.” - The unique aspect of GE’s business culture that allowed the Ideal Switch technology to develop over a decade, despite not producing income.- Why Chris compares the product development to an orchestra.- The process behind commercializing the metal MEMs technology and the decision to spinout from GE.

So listen in and tell us what you think!

3… 2… 1… Liftoff! In this episode of Moore’s Lobby, a veteran of the aerospace industry, Brent Sherwood, Blue Origin’s Senior Vice President of Advanced Development Programs, discusses the barriers and breakthroughs for all nations, companies, and people to (literally) get outta’ this world. 

Sherwood shares how his childhood dream to “build cities on the moon” led him on an unorthodox journey to become an aerospace engineer and one of the world’s leaders in the field of space exploration. Sherwood’s career has been spent living out his grown-up dreams. First at Boeing, then NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), and now Blue Origin. 

Architecting for space exploration and habitation requires a lot of people, money, and resources. It also takes a deep knowledge of hardware, mechanical, electrical, and industrial engineering in this new “space architecture” field. Sherwood brings us behind the scenes of both his experiences and Blue Origin’s projects and goals.

Sherwood addresses earth's fragility and space’s potential for human civilization and the development of new energy and material resources. Blue Origin is looking to dramatically reduce the cost and risk for people to pursue these goals and turn these dreams into reality. 

Science Fiction is Becoming a Science Reality 

Listen in on this great conversation with Brent Sherwood. Highlights include: 

-Why part of space is like “living inside of a VCR”

-How many sunrises and sunsets happen in space each day

-How power sources (e.g., sun and nuclear) will play critical roles in creating and maintaining space architecture 

-Design for reusable liquid rocket engines, microgravity, and timeless aesthetics

-The vision behind Blue Origin’s Orbital Reef - a commercially developed, owned, and operated space station scheduled to orbit by the end of this decade (that’s 2030—less 8 years away!)

-Sherwood discusses his favorite celestial body (everyone has one of those, right?)

The decades of perspective Mark Papermaster offers in this episode of Moore’s Lobby is something to pay attention to: from reminiscing on the early days of microprocessors to bringing the iPhone and iPod into the pockets of millions as humanity’s first “mini computers.” Papermaster provides a throwback to the epic AIM Alliance (Apple, IBM, and Motorola), a deep dive on AMD’s APU (accelerate processing unit), the breakdown of the buzz around designing “chiplets,” and how AMD learned to “punch above their weight” to take on competitors on who are 10X their size. 

Are you one of those EEs who gets "religious about one approach versus another”? Papermaster may influence your philosophy as Host Daniel Bogdanoff aims to uncover why Mark won’t stop “preaching modularity” as it is “a critical facet of scale and goes back to the history of engineering innovation.” Other topics include the importance of specialists and multidisciplinary engineering teams working together to solve the toughest problems and the fun behind AMD’s high-performance processors. 

You won’t want to miss Papermaster’s unfiltered stories on: 

-The risk of redesigning AMD’s Zen architecture

-Hear why many attorneys tell Papermaster “he is famous” for a landmark legal case (IBM vs Papermaster (Apple)), followed by lots of laughter because “engineers do not care”

-What it’s like to be recruited by Steve Jobs

-Get his take on what makes a great chip designer

-How his current chapter as AMD’s CTO and EVP of Technology and Engineering are “the most exciting years of his life”

-How AMD’s acquisition of ATI Graphics and Xilinx has set them apart in the market 

-And, make sure to listen until the end of the episode as Papermaster shares his opinion on the most crucial skill engineers need to have in their portfolio today

In this episode of Moore’s Lobby, Daniel speaks with Jonathan Ross whose journey as a hardware and software engineering expert is revolutionary and something to behold. Ross is a self-described “successful college dropout” with entrepreneur DNA who designed Google’s first TPU (tensor processing unit) and was a $10B idealist for X - the moonshot factory. After believing he was done with chips, Ross founded Groq and is now their fearless CEO leading the creation of some of the most ambitious AI hardware in the world.

What could you accomplish if you could dedicate 20% of your job to new ideas? While at Google, Ross was allowed to take on a “20% project”—an initiative that could take 20% of his time, if he thought it could benefit the company in some way. His 20% project ended with the creation of the first Tensor Processing Unit (TPU), a key hardware component on which Google built their world-changing data center processing (and what he affectionately calls “a successful disaster”). 

Now at Groq, Ross is leading a groundbreaking AI and high-performance computing company that’s tackling AI hardware with some surprising tactics. Their chips boast hundreds of times the processing power of current-gen processors. The kicker? It isn’t about using the most advanced transistors! According to Ross, the secret is in the chip architecture. 

Ross speaks to how “no one ever thinks of solving their problems with hardware”, yet he believes hardware can solve a plethora of technical problems that software can’t. Daniel and Ross go down the rabbit hole of comparing Groq’s chip to CPUs and GPUs.

“People still use CPUs because they take less time to give an answer than a GPU, but they give fewer. And what we've (Groq) done is, we've actually built a chip that does both. It gives you the answers quicker than even a CPU does, but it actually gives you the throughput of the parallel performance of a GPU, or better.”

He also brings a unique approach to new projects including the design of their unique processor. “If you want to design a car, do you ask a bunch of mechanics or do you ask drivers?” 

Some of Groq’s groundbreaking technology is powering autonomous vehicles, computing, data centers, drug discoveries, and even nuclear fusion. And, with investment topping $350 million, Groq stands to make big waves in the industry. 

Learn from Ross’ fountain of wisdom on chip architecture and large-scale industry trends. End enjoy lots of engineering jokes that are actually funny and notable stories including: 

-The evolution of a Google project from ”sea star” to “squirrel brain” and “superfluid”, before finally settling on something better

-The domain Elon Musk refuses to sell to Google

-Why Ross encourages everyone to accept a job at X - the moonshot factory aiming for $10B business ideas (yes, that’s with a B); but why it felt too much like retirement for him

-Hear Ross’ definition of machine learning that Daniel thinks is “the best he’s ever heard” 

-A somewhat stinging reminder that a human hasn’t beat a computer in chess in decades

-Learn what “Groq” (a play on grok) means as a term and as a company

-And, how Ross believes in balancing products with talent: “The better the product, the better the talent; the better the talent, the better the product. Because the best talent wants to work on the best products, and the best products are built by the best talent.”

Do you want to learn more about Groq or real-time AI, ML, & HPC solutions? Register HERE for GroqDay coming up fast this Thursday, March 31st, 2022. 

The second GroqDay is a series of virtual events bringing together enthusiasts and early adopters in the communities of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and high-performance computing.

The Metaverse is coming! It may be a virtual universe, but it has to run on real, physical, high-performance hardware. Tech mega-giant Qualcomm, led by Hugo Swart, is developing the chips behind new XR technology that has “the opportunity to change the world”, similar to the smartphone era. 

XR, for those still trying to catch up with the terminology, stands for “extended reality,” a concept that encompasses VR (virtual reality), AR (augmented reality), and sometimes MR (mixed reality).

In this episode of Moore’s Lobby, Daniel talks with Hugo about his background and the steps that led up to heading one of Qualcomm’s most forward-facing divisions—and when they realized they were “onto something” with this whole XR thing. Topics of discussion include cutting-edge IC design, the difference between designing for AR vs. smartphones, and the nitty-gritty of parameters like “common illumination.”

In this Moore’s Lobby Season 4 opener, there are numerous highlights that Daniel and Hugo cover that you won’t want to miss:

-Get that definition of the Metaverse you crave. (Spoilers: You’ll need to make room in your brain for more buzzwords, like “spatial internet.”)

-Hear Hugo explain Qualcomm’s Snapdragon XR2 platform’s impact on XR, the first mobile AR/VR chip uniting AI and 5G broadband connectivity with twice the CPU and GPU performance, and why TIME named it one of the “Best Inventions of 2021”.

-Discover how Magellan inspires engineers to sail for the “New New World” and why Hugo looks into the future and believes “your audience of engineers…they’re going to have a lot of fun.”

-Learn what it takes to build a chip suitable for multiple XR use cases, protect IP, and Hugo’s take on why ”power is king”. 

-Gain more knowledge on why Qualcomm’s key partnerships with Microsoft, Meta, and other Silicon Valley partners are significant—years before they hit the mainstream.

Season 4 of Moore's Lobby serves up conversations with some of the most fascinating leaders in the electronics industry. 

Join host Daniel Bogdanoff as he geeks out with CTOs, inventors, engineers, and more about the hottest trends and most interesting technologies that are changing the world.

A huge amount of the internet—up to a third of it, in fact—is run by Amazon Web Services. But the cloud, as Wayne Duso puts it, is not magic pixie dust. It works because of the blood, sweat, and tears of engineers. Hear all about it in this Season 3 finale of Moore's Lobby.

Wayne Duso is one of the leading minds behind AWS, someone deeply familiar with the technical challenges and heavy responsibility of handling a third of the internet’s traffic and data. AWS runs some of the top online services on the planet, including Netflix, Twitch, Facebook, Twitter, and more. 

In the last episode of 2021, we welcome Wayne to talk about AWS’s astronomical growth, Amazon’s “working backward” philosophy, and why data storage never gets boring. Wayne also explains what caused the internet to “burn down” recently when AWS servers went down and the mentality of approaching such a crisis like a firefighter.

Also included in this can’t-miss episode:

• How Wayne ended up in the data storage business (i.e., looking up “C for computer” in the phone book and more jokes about clam bakes than you’d expect)
• An inside look at AWS’s world-conquering success (including stories about Amazon CEO Andy Jassy and clearing up rumors of AWS’s origins)
• Stories from the early days of the internet (Who the heck are the Four Horsemen of the internet?!)
• Which one patent Wayne keeps on his wall when he threw away the other 35+
• Why hardware engineers are more important than ever in a software-driven world

Everybody knows cars are becoming more like computers than mechanical devices. Few know this better than Mark Allen, Global Vehicle Chief Engineer at GM, a company that’s been defining the American automotive business for a century. As an engineer who is also a car nut raised in the heart of American automotive manufacturing, Mark has a long view on the history and challenges of vehicle design.

The engineering that goes into making modern cars has changed enormously, to the point that Mark claims there are few purely mechanical systems left as electromechanical systems take over. This trend has also resulted in a blending of mechanical and electrical engineering tasks and skill sets, to the point that Mark says they barely distinguish between the two disciplines on the job. But, no matter what field they hail from, he says, engineers will never stop perfecting their craft, which is why the automotive industry has the performance and safety it does today.

In this episode of Moore’s Lobby, catch conversation between Daniel and Mark about:

• How new technologies like backup cams evolve from novelties to luxuries to expected to mandated
• The cost of electronics in modern cars (and why that’s harder to quantify than you might think)
• Designing cars vs. designing smartphones and how durability impacts product lifespan

Mark’s pure love of automotive carries through in this episode as he explains the lofty goals of the automotive industry, the difference having an EE CEO can make, and the (sometimes literal) highs and lows of vehicle testing.

"Want to subconsciously learn while being entertained?" says the ElectroBOOM YouTube page. "Then subscribe!!"

Mehdi Sadaghdar is well-known for several things: his YouTube videos, his habit of accidentally shocking himself in said videos, his sense of humor, his impressive unibrow. But Sadaghdar is also one of the few electrical engineer celebrities alive today and he's made a name for himself by creating electronics educational videos on YouTube.

Just as his YouTube page promises, ElectroBOOM makes over 4.8 million subscribers laugh with his particular brand of hijinks while also teaching them about concepts like current limiting and magnetic fields in BLDC motors. The result is somewhere between Bill Nye, Mythbusters, and the Marx Brothers.

In this episode of Moore's Lobby, Mehdi and Daniel chat about the role of YouTube and social media in modern engineering education, especially the idea of teaching by showing (occasionally shocking) mistakes.

Also included in this episode:

• The story of that one time Mehdi nearly died building a Jacob's Ladder
• Answering the question, "Is it the current or the voltage that kills you?"
• Throwing shade at mechanical engineers
• Rage at "free energy" products 
• The challenges of being an introverted engineer in the limelight

Turning science fiction into engineering reality is a complex business, but Ben Lamm has made it into a career. 

In this episode of Moore's Lobby, Daniel chats with Lamm, a serial entrepreneur who has founded several technology and science startups all through his 20s and 30s. One of these companies is Hypergiant, which helps governments and companies integrate cutting-edge AI into their aerospace, defense, and infrastructure. 

Now, Lamm has set his sights on bioengineering, where he's partnered with one of the leading experts in genomics, George Church, to bring back woolly mammoths in the form of engineered arctic elephants designed with mammoth DNA.

Yes, Ben has seen Jurassic Park. Yes, they get that question all the time. And, yes, you have got to hear how they're pulling this off. 

Join us to hear Ben recount his favorite projects throughout his career (so far) and explain his addiction to what's next in pursuing "the art of the possible."

Steve Orrin (self-described former hacker and undeniable math zealot) stands firmly at the crossroads between the public and private sectors, precisely where cybersecurity intersects with them both. From his viewpoint, it's a myth that the government is slow to adopt progressive technologies. Or, more accurately, reality resides in a nuanced gray area where Predator drones are outfitted with cutting-edge security and, somehow, painfully slow cloud adoption is actually a blessing in disguise.

In this episode, you'll hear about the impact of AI and quantum computing on cybersecurity, the "new math, new hardware" of next-gen cryptography, and how the heck to bring classified materials into the work-from-home environment of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Additional highlights from this episode include:

• A shockingly accessible explanation of homomorphic cryptography
• The unique joys of having Bruce Schneier rip one's carefully crafted cryptography stack to shreds
• How a security expert chooses a baby monitor these days
• Why maybe we should be designing security systems with our moms in mind

In this Industry Tech Days Keynote, we have an all-star panel of industry experts to talk about the ramifications of the global chip shortage and what lessons we can learn from them. You'll hear from Dave Doherty, President and COO of distributor Digi-Key Electronics, Steve Sanghi, Executive Chair of semiconductor manufacturer Microchip Technology, and Michael Knight, Corporate Senior Vice President of Business Development of distributor TTI.

2021 brought us the first functioning 2 nm chip, a milestone accomplished by a team at IBM Research, one of the foremost research institutions on the planet for the electronics industry.

In the upper echelons of this prestigious group is Dr. Jeffrey Welser, the Vice President of Exploratory Science and University Partnerships for IBM. In this episode of Moore's Lobby, Dr. Welser talks with Daniel about everything from quantum computing to CMOS devices to neural networks.

Two engineering students developed an autonomous golf cart system to transport people across campus. One accelerator program and a lot of engineering later, the same two engineers founded Embark, an autonomous trucking company that rapidly grew into a $5 billion endeavor. 

In 2018, when the company was only two years old, Embark claimed an industry-first: a 2,400-mile coast-to-coast journey for an autonomous truck from LA to Jacksonville, Florida. For the first time in many people's minds, autonomous trucking seemed to have arrived.

This is the story of Brandon Moak and Alex Rodrigues, CTO and CEO respectively of Embark. Moak joins us in the Lobby to talk about the challenges of scalable autonomous systems, gaining acceptance in the transportation industry, and the differences between passenger autonomous vehicles and those meant for the infrastructure of shipping.

What do Lady Gaga, DreamWorks, and SpaceX have in common? Would you believe us if we said the answer was tech? In this episode, two top HP execs talk about the unexpected ways this giant in the industry has gone from the inventors of the inkjet printer to Oscar-winning staple in Hollywood, healthcare, and some out-of-this-world applications.

Joining Daniel in the Lobby today are Jim Nottingham, Global Head & General Manager of HP’s Advanced Compute & Solutions, and Bruce Blaho, HP Fellow and Chief Technologist for the Advanced Compute & Solutions Business Unit in HP Personal Systems. Daniel guides Jim and Bruce through a conversation about HP's monolithic presence in the history of the electronics industry and how precision engineering has revolutionized display technology just in time for the age of remote work.

This trio of engineers delves into color fidelity across displays, data capture and storage, AI and machine learning, high-performance and edge compute, and the new wave of AR/VR.

Highlights you won't want to miss:

• What are HP's plans for an EGOT? (No, seriously.)
• What does "the HP way" mean nowadays?
• How does DreamWorks keep Shrek's signature green the same from one display to another?
• How do you get unneeded workstation equipment off the ISS? 
• What's next after keyboards and mouses? 

In their conversation, Victor, Michael, and Daniel will discuss what it's like to walk in space, the technologies that are propelling space exploration, and the importance of engineers in making aerospace history.

Arduino recently announced a monumental change in its new efforts towards producing affordable, scalable hardware for industrial automation applications. Hear the how and why of Arduino's jump from the hobbyist bench to the factory floor.

The advent of AI is forcing us to rethink the way we design hardware and changing the way we think of processing. After all, data-hungry applications are processor-hungry applications. 

In this episode of Moore’s Lobby, Daniel speaks with Michael Kagan, the CTO of NVIDIA, a tech giant and household name in processing. Kagan’s career spans foundational work across Intel, Mellanox, and now NVIDIA as they forge new technologies to enable accelerated compute.

Learn about the three core pillars of data center computing (spoilers: “GPU” might not mean what you think it means anymore). And learn why compute will soon need to become service-based as the burden of processing shifts increasingly to supercomputers.

And, of course, hear the historic reasons Kagan asserts that “chips without software is just expensive sand.”

You won’t find a more qualified voice on the intersection between processing, compute-hungry applications, and data centers, so don’t miss this episode.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. How do you get hardware engineers to attend a seminar about security?

Tell them it's a free buffet and then lock the doors behind them before you start the slide deck.

To put it mildly, security is not hardware designers' favorite topic. But with millions of unsecured devices in the market, it's quickly becoming an issue the industry can't ignore. 

Join our new host for Season 3, Daniel Bogdanoff, for this episode of Moore's Lobby that kicks off Season 3 with DARPA Program Manager at the Microsystems Technology Office (MTO), Serge Leef. Leef's storied background in design automation gives him a unique perspective on his current work as someone who helps select promising projects in the competitive world of DARPA funding.

Tune in to get a clear breakdown of the security issues facing hardware devices, including a look at the types of attacks DARPA has on its radar. You'll hear about the similarities and differences of securing missile control systems compared to smart toilets. And, perhaps most importantly, you'll be faced with the very real question of whether hardware security is something we should entrust to design engineers at all.

Along the way, you'll get answers to burning questions you never knew you had, like:

• How is a DARPA program manager like a movie producer?
• How is IC-level hardware design like fluoride? And
• How is designing for security like selling vitamins?

Season 3 of Moore's Lobby serves up conversations with some of the most fascinating luminaries in the electronics industry. 

Join host Daniel Bogdanoff as he geeks out with CTOs, inventors, astronauts, and more about the technologies that are changing the world.

Google is one of the most prominent corporations in history. Since its founding in 1998, it's gone from a scrappy startup in Silicon Valley to the portal through which most people access the internet. 

How do you even begin to design compute infrastructure that massive?

This week on Moore's Lobby, Dave talks with TWO Google Senior VPs of Engineering, Google Fellows Luiz Barroso and Amin Vahdat. 

In this conversation, you'll hear about the early days of Google, back when their data centers were barely more than broom closets and the team was "unencumbered by expertise" in data center design. You'll hear about the off-the-wall iterations of their early data center ideas (like that time Google put their data centers into shipping containers, which is way more reasonable than it may sound at first). You'll hear about the incredible promise of the applications Google's tackling today—and the costs that come with that world-changing power.

On the way, you'll learn more about two electrical engineers who came from very different backgrounds, pursued different specialties in academia, and yet ended up working together on some of the most extraordinary challenges facing compute in the modern era. 

This episode will illuminate the past and future of Google from the engineering side and how “healthy hubris” leads to "a healthy disregard for the impossible.”

Luiz André Barroso is a Google Fellow leading the office of Cross-Google Engineering (XGE) from where he coordinates key technical initiatives that span multiple Google products. Over his two decades at Google he has worked as a VP of Engineering in the Core and Maps teams, and was a technical leader in areas such as Google Search and the design of Google’s computing platform.

Luiz has published several technical papers and has co-authored “The Datacenter as a Computer”, the first textbook to describe the architecture of warehouse-scale computing systems, now in its 3rd edition. Luiz is a Fellow of the ACM and the AAAS, and holds B.S. and M.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the Pontifícia Universidade Católica of Rio de Janeiro and a Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from the University of Southern California. Recently he was awarded the 2020 Eckert-Mauchly Award.

Amin Vahdat is a Google Fellow and Technical Lead for networking at Google. He has contributed to Google’s data center, wide area, edge/CDN, and cloud networking infrastructure, with a particular focus on driving vertical integration across large-scale compute, networking, and storage.

In the past, he was the SAIC Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at UC San Diego and the Director of UCSD’s Center for Networked Systems. Vahdat received his PhD from UC Berkeley in Computer Science, is an ACM Fellow and a past recipient of the NSF CAREER award, the Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, and the Duke University David and Janet Vaughn Teaching Award.

Microchip Technology is so recognizable in the semiconductor industry that it's hard to contemplate that it struggled rather a lot in its early years. From its split from General Instrument to its rocky beginnings as a company teetering on the edge of bankruptcy and on through its remarkable 121 consecutive profitable quarters, Microchip has fought for every inch of success it's achieved.

In the middle of it all has been Steve Sanghi, CEO from 1990 until 2021, when he took on the role of Executive Chair. Steve has been an active driver in the industry, taking a "different-by-design"—or even straight-up risky—perspective in his approach to technology and leadership.

In this episode of Moore's Lobby, Dave guides us through highlights of Steve's storied history of guiding Microchip into the modern era. Hear stories that paint a clear, oftentimes surprising portrait of the industry.

Identifying what technology is going to change the world next is a superpower everyone wishes they had. If you could see where advancements were being made and where funds were being invested—and if you had the vision to act on what you saw—what could you accomplish?

This is basically a job description for the CTO of Microsoft US, who is our guest this week on Moore's Lobby. Gina Loften is an electrical engineer, leader, author, and executive whose purpose is to identify the next big technologies, lead one of the most advanced teams of engineers on the planet to create solutions for them, and then help the largest corporations adopt them into their processes seamlessly. 

Loften has been on the front lines of AI for years, from the public introduction of IBM's Watson to the new battlefield of bringing AI to the edge, which stands to affect everything from healthcare to retail. She has a unique perspective on what it means for engineers to specialize in a particular field and why they should care about what the next technological revolution brings.

In this episode, Loften discusses the rapidly evolving technology industry and how engineers should see themselves within it. As Loften puts it, "The world does not work without engineers."

About five years ago, we reached the tipping point where it became cheaper to build a new wind farm than to build a conventional thermal power plant. Now we’re staring down the barrel of a second tipping point, where it will be cheaper to build a new wind farm than it will be to operate an existing conventional power plant.

In this episode, Dave speaks with the VP and CTO of GE Renewable Energy, Dr. Danielle Merfeld, about the current state of renewables. 

You’ll hear valuable advice about following your passions from an executive at one of the largest technology corporations on the planet who is both young and an electrical engineer. From her decision to pursue her Ph.D. to the role of company culture in finding the right people to work with, Dr. Merfeld humanizes the engineering processes that are driving the future of renewables.

Learn about where we stand on the key concepts of energy diversity, storage, and transmission. Hear the challenges of educating people on a subject that’s often misunderstood and also evolving rapidly. And listen in as an executive truly nerds out about “imminently manageable” power electronics in renewables.

For some, it's a prototyping tool. For others, it's a gateway to freedom of expression. 

It's been a powerful tool for STEM education, an object of scorn, and the hardware platform that's launched a thousand Kickstarters.

But no matter what your expectations are, Arduino will surprise you in 2021.

Hear all about the origins of Arduino as an exercise in usability and open-source philosophy. Learn how Arduino transformed the maker movement and vice versa. And listen in as the co-founder of one of the most popular hardware platforms on Earth talks about the beauty and backlash of making hardware simple enough for all.

This episode has a wealth of insights about the nature of creativity in design, but it also has several excellent quotes from Massimo Banzi, including:

• “So I showed up with a bunch of potatoes and lemons…”
• "When they looked at Arduino, they said, 'What the hell is this thing?'"
• "...you, as a developer, were expected to be a professional. So you were supposed to suffer a little bit, you know?"
• "The world is full of grumpy engineers."

and, of course,

• "Baby talk for potheads."

Massimo Banzi is the co-founder of Arduino, one of the most popular hardware platforms in history. He is an electrical engineer and educator, as well as a self-described open-source advocate.

An important part of Massimo's career is his background in interaction design, which has provided him formal training on how to make hardware accessible to everyone. 

Banzi has been a professor at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Southern Switzerland (SUPSI), the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design, the Domus Academy, and the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea. He's also co-founded two FabLabs—digital fabrication labs—in his home country of Italy.

In addition to his work with Arduino, Massimo has served as a consultant for brands like Prada, Whirlpool, and Adidas.

To say that autonomous vehicles represent a huge number of engineering challenges is an understatement. To some engineers, they seem insurmountable. To others, like Mo ElShenawy, they're part of another day at the office.

This week, Dave speaks with Mo ElShenawy, Senior VP of Engineering for Cruise. Cruise began as a startup out of Y Combinator and rose to prominence as a powerhouse of machine vision and data processing for autonomous vehicle development. Acquired by GM in 2016, Cruise today works with companies like Honda and Microsoft to bring fully autonomous (and zero emissions) vehicles to scale. 

Mo runs Cruise's largest department, leading 1,000+ engineers in what is arguably one of the most significant engineering challenges of our generation. In this episode, you’ll hear Dave and Mo discuss the hardware and software challenges of designing AVs, why AVs should be safer than human drivers, and why Mo doesn’t believe in “tech for tech’s sake.” 

Mohamed “Mo” ElShenawy’s career has spanned several unique industries that share a unifying need for scalable automation technologies. He joined Cruise in 2018, where he now leads over 1,000 engineers as Senior Vice President of Engineering as the team tackles safe, scalable AV deployment, starting with San Francisco.

"Smart city" isn't exactly an engineering term. And yet engineers are responsible for developing the technologies that take a city from being advanced to being "smart," including wireless communications, sensor fusion, and machine-learning algorithms implemented to serve public life. 

But it turns out the real hurdles in the way of smart city technologies are much more human and complex than we may realize.

In this episode, Dave speaks with Karen Lightman, the Executive Director of Carnegie Mellon's Metro21 Smart Cities Institute about how engineering and public policy work hand-in-hand in smart cities. Hear about the tragedies of falling in love with a chip design that doesn't have a market, the dangers of avoiding standards in the tech industry, and the importance of testing smart city technologies in real-world "living laboratories"—or "living sandboxes," as Karen prefers to call them.

Dr. Aaron Edsinger spent years at MIT CSAIL's Humanoid Robotics Group, building robots in the shape of human torsos under the tutelage of world-renowned roboticist Rodney Brooks. It may seem strange, then, that the flagship product at his latest startup, Hello Robot, doesn't look human at all. 

Listen in to hear about how Edsinger views the difference between startups and corporate life when it comes to innovation that truly serves people and communities well, from the iterative design process down to the pragmatism of simple design.

Edsinger has run the gamut from founding robotics startups to Head of Robotics at Google to founding robotics startups acquired by Google. Throughout, he's gained unique perspective on what it means to design robotics that are designed for the market and how that differs from designs that are market-ready. 

This week in the Lobby, we have one of the original leaders of the single-board computer (SBC) industry, Jason Kridner of BeagleBoard.org, whose BeagleBone line of open-source SBCs is manufactured by Texas Instruments in partnership with Digi-Key and Newark element14. 

In this episode, Jason and Dave get into the importance of rapid prototyping for embedded systems in an era where time-to-market trumps all.

Core to this episode is the democratization of working with neural networks through SBCs like BeagleBoard AI. How will the industry change as access to developing machine learning algorithms becomes more common? And how responsible are developers for bias in AI, anyway?

Tune in for a great conversation about hardware, ethics, and embedded prototyping!

Did you know that changing the size of a quantum dot changes the color it emits without altering any other properties? This deceptively simple fact goes down to the quantum level, where the color of a quantum dot can be controlled by changing how many nanometers across it is.

In this episode of Moore's Lobby, we're diving into what Dr. Seth Coe-Sullivan calls "the quantum weirdness" as we explore the concepts of nanotechnology and quantum dots. 

Coe-Sullivan is the CEO, President, and co-founder of NS Nanotech, a company that is blazing trails towards the next paradigm shift in display technologies while at the same time releasing practical far-UVC products used to battle viruses in healthcare applications.

You'll hear Seth demystify many of the most complex and cutting-edge concepts that will govern how sharp and bright displays will be in the future, from AR/VR to mobile device screens to digital signage. And you'll get a crash course in nanotechnology straight from one of the leading experts in the field. 

As CTO and co-founder of Virgin Hyperloop, Giegel is a mechanical engineer, former aerospace researcher, and a transportation revolutionary.

Hyperloop transportation has always been a bombastic proposal. Virgin Hyperloop aims to provide ground transportation up to 670 miles per hour. At those speeds, you could step into a hyperloop pod in New York City at noon and step out of it in Los Angeles in time for dinner five hours later, requiring 10x less energy than an airplane.

A robust hyperloop transportation infrastructure would change the way we travel forever.

As Giegel puts it, being one of two of the very first "hypernauts" was something akin to a Roman architect standing underneath an arch he designed. He put his very life into the hands of the engineers he leads, trusting them to hurl him 500 meters in 15 seconds—the initial test of Virgin Hyperloop's test track. 

Hear Giegel talk about the vision behind his company's goals of creating a fully-electric, high-power, autonomous maglev system. (Spoilers: As it turns out, a hyperloop is just one of the ways their technology stands to change the transportation world.) You'll hear a fellow engineer discuss the technical elements of hyperloop creation that have long made experts think hyperloops are science fiction. 

Would you know history if you were standing in the middle of it? Learn how much closer we are to the age of the hyperloop than you probably realize.

What does it take for a motorsport team to win five Formula E championships? And how do automotive companies translate that success into the electric vehicles we drive every day?

We’re kicking off Season 2 of Moore’s Lobby with a guest who will be familiar to motorsports fans across Formula 1 and its electric vehicle counterpart, Formula E. 

Motorsports are the ultimate proving ground for automotive technologies. When it comes to electric vehicles, no prototyping in the world can match the rigor—and the excitement—of a Formula E race. 

Learn about crucial power design aspects in Formula E, including why the engineers have evolved towards using direct drive motors and one battery rather than two. And did you know that the cars must regenerate around 30% of the energy used during a race through regenerative braking, etc.? And that the drivers must trigger it manually at key moments?

Hear the details from an expert who has made a career out of blazing trails.

Season 2 of Moore's Lobby releases January 21st, 2021! 

Last year, we brought you the personal stories and experiences of some of the most interesting engineers from some of the most respected companies in our industry. This season, you’ll get cutting-edge insights from the leaders of groundbreaking companies like Virgin Hyperloop, Formula E, NS Nanotech, and many more.

This keynote panel is moderated by engineer, New York Times bestselling author and producer of the Moore's Lobby podcast on All About Circuits, Dave Finch. 

About Our Panelists

Mark Burr-Lonnon, Senior Vice President of Global Service & EMEA and APAC Business at Mouser Electronics

Mark Burr-Lonnon, Senior Vice President of Global Service & EMEA and APAC Business, helps guide and lead Mouser Electronics’ global service strategy as well as day-to-day international efforts. Today, with the help of his vision, Mouser has 27 Customer Service Centers strategically positioned around the globe, providing local language, currency, and same time-zone support. He brings a wealth of global electronics distribution experience, totaling over 35 years.

Dave Doherty, President and Chief Operating Officer at Digi-Key Electronics

Dave Doherty, President and Chief Operating Officer at Digi-Key Electronics, brings over 30 years of professional experience between the semiconductor manufacturing and electronics distribution industries, the last 10+ with Digi-Key. His experience and knowledge enables him to provide great insight and innovative leadership within Digi-Key and the electronics industry. Dave holds a BSEE from Worcester Polytechnic Institute, an MBA from Babson College, and has served as President of the Educational Foundation Board for the Electronics Component Industry Association as well as the chairperson for their Executive Conference.

Frank McKay, Senior Vice President & Chief Procurement Officer at Jabil, Inc.

Frank McKay is the Sr. Vice President & Chief Procurement Officer for Jabil, Inc., a global manufacturing solutions company with revenue of more than $25B. He leads an organization of approximately 600 employees located in the Americas, Europe, and Asia that are responsible for the company’s procurement and supply chain activities.

In this keynote, Dev Singh will engage in discussion with Dave Finch, engineer, New York Times bestselling author, and producer of the Moore's Lobby podcast on All About Circuits. The keynote session will be followed by a live Q&A with the audience.

About Dev Singh

Dev Singh serves as Senior Director of Business Development and Head of Autonomous Robotics, Drones and Intelligent Machines at Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. Dev is responsible for leading and managing the robotics and intelligent machines in the IoT business unit where he focuses on strategy, business development, R&D investments and execution for accelerating net revenue growth while optimizing operating cost. Prior to this role, he led the execution of multimedia IP development across Snapdragon application processor platforms for mobile, IoT, and automotive segments.

He began his career at Texas Instruments and served in various engineering and leadership roles for execution, operations, product management, and new product development across TI’s foundry and analog products business units for over 10 years.

Dev holds an M.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Arkansas.

In this keynote, Lucas and Bryn will engage in discussion with Dave Finch, engineer, New York Times bestselling author, and producer of the Moore's Lobby podcast on All About Circuits. The keynote session will be followed by a live Q&A with the audience.

About Lucas di Grassi

Born in Sao Paulo, Lucas di Grassi is one of developers of the highly successful, electric-powered Formula E. Lucas also is a member of the board and developer of Roborace, the racing series for electric cars run by artificial intelligence which is set to become the most efficient developing environment for connected AI-based technology. Recently, Lucas was announced as partner and ambassador for the Electric Scooter Championship (eSC), a new international series aimed to promote both competition and technology development for urban micro-mobility.

Di Grassi drew international attention when he drove a Formula E car on the North Pole ice cap to set an alert to global warming. In May 2018, Lucas was appointed ambassador for the United Nations Environment Program with the mission to increase awareness about poor urban air quality, which causes over 6 million premature deaths around the world.

Lucas is the most relevant driver of the FIA Formula E history having amassed the impressive sequence of three thirds and a second championship season places, plus the 2017 world title. Having previously competed in Formula One, di Grassi is again a title contender of FIA World Formula E Championship for the official Audi Sport Abt Schaeffler team.

About Bryn Balcombe

Bryn Balcombe is the Chief Strategy Officer for Roborace. He received his BEng in Mechanical Engineering and Vehicle Design from the University of Hertfordshire. Balcombe previously spent 16 years working with Formula One racing, architecting communication systems for vehicle-to-infrastructure connectivity, as well as implementing the Formula One Global Media Network. He has experience on projects ranging from circuit development to full tracking systems and automated vehicles.

Balcombe is the founder of ADA.ngo, a non-profit alliance developed to ensure the safe and ethical deployment of human-centric artificial intelligence in automotive applications to prevent road traffic injuries. ADA.ngo supports the use of motorsports as a means of accelerated R&D for automotive AI.

He additionally serves as the Chair of ITU Focus Group on AI for Autonomous and Assisted Driving for the International Telecommunication Union (ITU FG-AI4AD), where this focus group serves as a forum for international organizations such as governments and research institutions can collaborate to evaluate AI-assisted and automated vehicle safety. 

In this episode, Professor Anant Agarwal spoke with host Dave Finch about the next 5, 10, 25 years of online education for engineers. The keynote session was followed by a live Q&A with the audience.

Anant Agarwal is the Founder and CEO of edX. Anant taught the first edX course on circuits and electronics from MIT, which drew 155,000 students from 162 countries. He has served as the director of CSAIL, MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and is a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT. He is a successful serial entrepreneur, having co-founded several companies including Tilera Corporation, which created the Tile multicore processor, and Virtual Machine Works.

Anant won the Maurice Wilkes prize for computer architecture, and MIT's Smullin and Jamieson prizes for teaching. He is also the 2016 recipient of the Harold W. McGraw, Jr. Prize for Higher Education, which recognized his work in advancing the MOOC movement. Additionally, he is a recipient of the Padma Shri award from the President of India and was named the Yidan Prize for Education Development Laureate in 2018. He held a Guinness World Record for the largest microphone array, and is an author of the textbook "Foundations of Analog and Digital Electronic Circuits."

Scientific American selected his work on organic computing as one of 10 World-Changing Ideas in 2011, and he was named in Forbes' list of top 15 education innovators in 2012. Anant, a pioneer in computer architecture, is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a fellow of the ACM.

In this episode, Richard Barry discusses real-time edge processing with Dave Finch, New York Times bestselling author and producer of the Moore's Lobby podcast on All About Circuits. 

Richard Barry founded the FreeRTOS project in 2003, spent more than a decade developing and promoting FreeRTOS through his company Real Time Engineers Ltd, and currently continues his work on FreeRTOS as a senior principal engineer at Amazon Web Services.

FreeRTOS is a cross-platform standard RTOS kernel for microcontrollers with ports to more than 40 microcontroller cores and 18 toolchains. FreeRTOS is now downloaded once every 175 seconds – making FreeRTOS one of the leading RTOSes in its class.

Richard graduated with 1st Class Honors in Computing for Real-Time Systems, and was awarded an Honorary Doctorate for his contributions to the development of embedded technology. Richard has also been directly involved in the startup of several companies and authored several books.

This week in Moore's Lobby, our guest is Matthew Dominick—EE, Navy test pilot, and astronaut for NASA.

You'll hear Matthew and Dave hit on a slew of topics. What's the ultimate "double E airplane"? What makes touchscreen vs. button interface design so incredibly important in the cockpit of a fighter jet? What is WOM and why do we rely on it so much for education? And what makes Matthew describe part of his job as being a "translator"?

This episode delves into the complexities of moving towards RF-enabled devices, Matthew's "weird hobby" of writing software, the role of augmented reality in the coolest of wearables (i.e., fighter pilot helmets), and the challenges facing engineers designing technologies meant to function on the surface of the moon.

Also, toasters. (No, really. There's a surprising amount of talk about toasters.)

In this episode of Moore's Lobby, we continue our series on wireless connectivity for the IoT. This time, we're focusing on Zigbee, Z-Wave, and Bluetooth mesh.

Learn about the "Balkanization" of IoT connectivity, hear where these three specifications fit in the landscape of smart devices, and get to know the new industry standard for hardware of "Can it run Doom?"

And Dave narrowly avoids making a "pardon our meshy home" pun. 

In our eighth episode, host Dave Finch discusses how to get from prototype to market, zeroing in on the process of DFM or, more accurately DFX, which stands for "Design for" ...well, anything that comes after the design.

Why does cost go up after a product's been released for a while? When should you consider certifcation in the design process? How can young engineers hope to familiarize themselves with DFM if they never even designed a full board in school?

Learn the many good reasons engineers should know their board manufacturers. Consider how EMS (electronic manufacturing services) companies have evolved from mere contractors into design partners.

And hear some truly unfortunate stories about what happens when you fail to plan beyond the circuit design stage appropriately.

Don't call it a wireless protocol! In this episode of Moore's Lobby, we're talking about Wi-SUN, an interoperable, auto-optimizing wireless IoT specification that supports smart city functionality in dense urban environments. 

What do you imagine when you think of the smart cities of the future? IoT streetlights, smart metering, gunshot detection, pollution sensing—the possibilities of interconnected, wireless sensor networks and communications are endless. 

We'll take a hardware designer's look at a new and rising wireless IoT specification that is open rather than proprietary. Along the way, you'll hear two engineers explain the complex world of wireless communication in their own words and share their experiences with the evolution of IoT design and why the move towards modules can "take all the fun out of some of RF design."

In this episode of Moore's Lobby, Dave sits down with two engineers about power design in the automotive space. 

You'll hear about how ignoring the holistic system in favor of high efficiency can mean too much of a good thing. You'll learn about IGBTs vs. MOSFETs in the automotive space. And you'll also pick up snippets about why single-sourced new components are forbidden fruit and why it's important to acknowledge that copper's not getting any more efficient.

Thermal management, EMI, switching losses, oh my! This episode is full to the brim of the technical details practicing EEs crave.

In this episode of Moore's Lobby, host Dave Finch takes a look at wireless IoT technologies and comes away with the knowledge that there is definitely no such thing as a "one size fits all" solution. 

Hear the voices of two experts weigh in: CEO of The Things Network, Wienke Giezeman, and CTO/COO of Senet (as well as LoRa Alliance board member), Dave Kjendal. 

This conversation will dive into the intricacies and extraordinary promise of one of the most versatile protocols out there: LoRaWAN.

Welcome to the age of coding. Hardware design has changed a lot in recent years, in no small part because electrical engineers are required to take part in more and more firmware and software design.

In this episode of Moore's Lobby, host Dave Finch talks to two engineers with storied careers about how the engineers at their two mega-companies rely on coding skills to make the best products possible. 

First, you'll hear Tim Saeger—Executive Vice President and Chief R&D Officer at iRobot—explain the importance of software development in robotics applications.

Then you'll dive into the details with Sean Newton—Microcontroller Applications Manager, Americas at STMicroelectronics—as he and Dave talk shop about the use of control algorithms for MCUs and motor control applications.

When you're launching the next Falcon rocket or Mars rover, the last thing you want is one line of Verilog standing between you and a successful test. Sandip Dasgupta, Senior Electrical Engineer at SpaceX talks about smart rockets, FPGA design, and where SpaceX gets its ICs in this episode of Moore's Lobby.

How do electrical engineers innovate? How can they take the risks needed to try new things when they're focused on delivering functional designs on time and under budget? Hear three industry voices dig into the how—and, more importantly, the why—of innovation in the trenches of electronic design.

In the face of the most severe pandemic in a century, how are electrical engineers dealing with the challenge of working from home? Here are three stories of engineering success in spite of separation from teams and equipment.

Get a first look at EETech's premier media podcast, Moore’s Lobby: Where engineers talk all about circuits. Moore’s Lobby looks at the story behind technology and the people who created it. Be sure to subscribe to the show!