Embedded Executive Podcast

When it comes to security, nothing should be taken for granted and a developer should never assume. First, start the security discussion right at the beginning of the design. And keep it in mind throughout the process. But also, understand the cost of security. While it’s important to prevent hacks, the amount of dollars and resources spent on security must be part of an intelligent business decis...

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

Standards abound in the world of the IoT. There are standards organizations, some ad-hoc, some with some real muscle behind them. That is certainly the case when it comes to security for the IoT. But what if you’re designing to “open standards?” That’s something that crossed my desk recently, and to be honest, I wasn’t sure what it meant, so I decided to go to the source of that phrase, Marcin Nag...

Higher voltages and higher frequencies are becoming commonplace in embedded designs. That in itself doesn’t necessarily cause an issue. But when you add in that packages continue to shrink in size, you have the potential for detrimental heat and airflow issues. How do you deal with that? That’s where the discussion started with Dr. Phil Lessner, the Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Offic...

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

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

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

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

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

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

I think it’s awesome when some of the bigger vendors in our space help fund start-ups. One example of that is Maxim Ventures , an arm of Maxim Integrated . The investment group is funding a bunch of startups in the medical space. You go into these things knowing that some of your investments are going to pay off and some aren’t. But if you pick a big-time winner, it can pay off in spades. Maxim Ve...

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

RISC-V gets a lot of attention as an open-source ISA. Is that attention warranted? The answer, unfortunately, is that it depends. It depends on what problem you’re trying to solve, your familiarity with the tools, your design window, and your engineering talent. The aspect I wanted to confirm was whether the ecosystem is ready for prime time, because as you know, no matter how great your silicon i...

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

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

I think the embedded industry and its associated technology is very cool. Call me a geek if you must. But every once in a while, I come across a technology that takes “cool” to a completely different level. That occurred this week when I interviewed Florian Bohn, the Co-Founder and CEO of GuRu Wireless. The company is close to commercializing wireless charging, where the charging is done at a dist...

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

SECO USA does not produce ventilators. However, its customers do. As a result, SECO USA forged a partnership to produce, manufacture, and donate those ventilators to needy hospitals in the US. It’s great to see things like this, when so many people are in need during the COVID-19 pandemic. As Greg Nicoloso, the CEO of SECO USA explained, the company doesn’t want to be a medical-device supplier, bu...

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

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

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

Tracing of products is an important function. It can be used for everything from property loss to food and medicine whereabouts, and lots of stuff in between. Another interesting application for tracing, especially in our new normal, is knowing when people are practicing social distancing. Wiser Systems specializes in tracing, so I wondered whether its technology could be used to track people. Tha...

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

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

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