DevTalk with Rich and Vin

MCU vendors always knew that, regardless of what they might say, it was relatively easy to retain existing customers and quite difficult to get engineers to switch from a competitive architecture.  The biggest reason for that is the tons of software that the customer already has in its arsenal, and the difficulty of rewriting that code for a different architecture.  However, and this is a biggie,...

AI means different things to different people. For example, a marketer might have a different definition than an engineer when asked what AI is. In today’s complex world, both may be right. But when consumers need to understand what is AI about their devices, the waters can get muddied pretty quickly.  On this episode of DevTalk with Rich and Vin, we share our definitions, which are open to debate...

You need some sort of UI on your system. It may be quite elaborate, or it may be very simple. In either case, designing that UI should not be a barrier to entry for an embedded system. Enter LVGL , or Light and Versatile Graphics Library, an open-source embedded graphics library that aims to (and accomplishes) eliminating that barrier.  To understand why this is even an issue and how designers can...

Does the academic world do a good job at getting its students ready to work in the real world? Is it even possible to do that now, given the pace AI is forcing industry to move at, and knowing that academia doesn’t typically move that quickly?  This is the tip of the iceberg from the discussion that Vin and I had on our latest DevTalk podcast with John Janowiak, the Executive Director of ECEDHA (t...

We know that AI is everywhere. An area of particular concern for the DevTalk crew is how AI fits into today’s higher education programs. With our special guest Kevin Lu, the Associate Dean for Engineering and Science for Undergraduate Studies at Stevens Institute of Technology, we look at two specific areas—how do you ensure that students aren’t “cheating” by making use of AI, and second, how do y...

The user interface, aka the HMI, is oftentimes the only interaction a user has with a platform. Hence, it represents your brand, and it needs to look great and work great.  On this episode of DevTalk with Rich and Vin, we discuss what it takes to properly design a great HMI, as well as how much effort needs to go into it. And we get an assist from Renesas, who are making HMIs one of the company’s...

Every once in a while, we hit a home run when it comes to bringing guests onto the DevTalk podcast, and today we did just that.  We managed to wrangle in Hidetoshi Shibata, who has been in his current CEO role at Renesas for about six years. Toshi was very forthcoming with us, as we went through his fairly colorful past, and more importantly, the decisions he has had to make as the CEO of one of t...

If you believe all the hype, it seems that AI is being integrated into nearly every embedded computing platform. It may not be every one, but the percentage is fairly high and growing.  So, as a developer, do you know what your starting point should be for your project?  What Vin and I discovered, thanks to Avijit Sinha, Senior VP of Strategy and Global Business Development at Wind River , is that...

You likely have heard of the Rust programming language, known for its safety features. But, like me, you may not know its details, and frankly, why you should be considering it for your next design. For those reasons, Rich and Vin invited Jonathan Pallant, a Senior Engineer with Ferrous Systems , to join them on this episode of DevTalk with Rich and Vin .

Just about everybody in the engineering space has reverse-engineered a product at some point. It might have been for professional reasons, like seeing how a competitor is attacking a problem or simply seeing how they engineered a product. Or it could have been for personal reasons, because the product stopped working, or simply because they wanted to.  Note: If you search for “Tear Down” on Embedd...

Theoretically, you can do whatever functions you require in hardware or software. The most efficient way to complete those functions is with the proper mix of hardware and software. The important question is how you determine what gets implemented in hardware versus what’s in software.  What if you can do a quasi-hardware-software mix? That’s what is available through embedded FPGAs.  To understan...

Most people in our embedded industry are familiar with Steve Sanghi, who has been the CEO of Microchip for more than thirty years. Steve took over the company in its not-so-successful early days and brought it to the great heights we know today, as a multi-billion dollar semiconductor powerhouse. Steve stepped down from the CEO role a few years ago and is now doing lots of philanthropic work and w...

Maher Matta, the President of the Americas division of Infineon Technologies agreed to join Rich and Vin on this episode of the podcast. The audience will likely relate to the route taken by Maher, as he came up through the engineering ranks, starting as a bench engineer. As you might expect, there were some bumps and bruises along the way. If you subscribe to the theory that the proof is in the p...

The space program has come quite far in the last decade when it comes to sending people to Mars and building a colony there. If you’re wondering what it would take to accomplish that, check out the book Colonizing Mars by Frank Norris. Or, take the easy way out and check out the latest DevTalk with Rich and Vin podcast, where we invited Frank on as a guest.

As the complexity of our embedded systems has exploded, particularly in the automotive space, a requirements-management tool has moved into the “must-have” category. With the volume of people, the humongous code base, and the geographically disparate design teams, it’s nearly impossible to maintain and track every aspect of a design. With all that said, Rich and Vin talk about this need and the fa...

Engineers know how important it is to test their prototypes. What they don’t seem to get is that the testing process needs to start at the beginning of the design process, not at the end. And testing must continue all the way through the entire design process. The reasons for this are what Rich and Vin go through on this episode of DevTalk with Rich and Vin.

In this episode of DevTalk with Rich (Nass) and Vin (D’Agostino), Matt Johnson, the CEO of Silicon Labs joins us. It’s a lively discussion, starting in rural Maine, and ending with “Should engineers be concerned that AI will take their jobs?” Listen in for some interesting responses.

Welcome to a slightly different version of our DevTalk with Rich and Vin podcast. In addition to doing our traditional tech talks, which you’ve clearly told us that you enjoy, we will be producing discussions with CEOs. But we won’t be going through the usual company blah, blah, blah. We’re going to dig a little deeper and find out what really drives these individuals, who are obviously very deter...

Chiplets are quite in vogue these days. But are they the solution to all your problems? Probably not, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t understand what they are, how they work, and how you can implement them in your design. Check out this installment of DevTalk with Rich and Vin and you’ll at least have a baseline understanding of this technology.

This is the time of year for predictions: What do you think will happen in 2024?  As you might expect, Rich and Vin take a different approach. They look at the things that were predicted for 2023, but didn’t actually pan out. Is AI the panacea that we expected? Maybe not. It’s likely that more partnerships must occur for this technology to match the hype. Tune in and let us know if you agree or di...

In the golden era of electrical engineering, when yours truly was a budding designer, we worked with a processor, like an 8051 or an 8085, and we wrote some code to go with it. Programmable log? It existed, but those things were too darn expensive for what we called mainstream or mid-range applications.  Fast forward to today, and you’d be hard pressed to come up with application that doesn’t make...

When content gets posted to Embedded Computing Design that’s latest “The Basics of …” or “XYZ 101,” the content usually gets tons of page views. I always wondered why that was the case. Are our engineers not as knowledgeable as we think? Are they just checking to make sure their assumptions are correct? I decided this would be a good topic for Vin, who teaches classes in some of these basics. Chec...

Are you wondering what would be considered a practical application for AI at the endpoint (the place where the data is captured)? Well, you’re in luck, because Rich is moderating a panel at Renesas’ AI Live virtual conference that specifically covers that topic.  To get one more opinion on what is a practical application, Rich and Vin discuss exactly that, and as you’d expect, Vin dives in pretty...

Seemingly, if you've read any news report that touches on the technology sector, there’s some mention of artificial intelligence. But too often, we hear people talking about AI as an application, and that’s wrong, just like the IoT is not an application. Rather, it’s an enabler to other applications. AI helps enhance your XYZ application, making it better, faster, etc. But that’s all it is, a...

Whether you’re aware of it or not. AI is pervading many of our “traditional” applications, such as HVAC. Adding some smarts to this equipment allows the HVAC system to perform longer and more efficiently, resulting in a better user experience and a cost savings. To get a better handle on how this works and how it should be implemented, Rich and Vin spoke to Nalin Balan, a Business Development Mana...