Embedded Executive Podcast

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

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

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

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

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

The definition of “low power” can differ based on your application. Low power for an industrial system supplier can differ greatly from that of a medical device maker. Regardless, I think we can agree that power levels are coming down, but not at the rate that users and OEMs would like. To that end, the designers at InnoPhase have developed a power-reduction technique for wireless connection devic...

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

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

There are obvious phases of any design. You know them as well as I do, but the one that doesn’t seem to garner its share of attention is test. It could be because test is hard and not well understood. Or it could be because a percentage of engineers feel that test should be handled by the test engineers exclusively. To better understand what’s meant by this process and how it fits into the overall...

 The power that’s required to charge electric vehicles is quite high. And when you add wireless charging, the issues grow significantly. But what exactly are those electric vehicle charging issues, and how do we solve them? And why are people afraid to charge their batteries to 199 percent? That’s just the beginning of the discussion I had with Dr. Phil Lessner, Senior Vice President and Chief Tec...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LF Edge is an umbrella organization operating within the Linux Foundation. The group recently made an important announcement around open-source software and tools. The announcement has to do with a new release that adds a lot of new features and new ecosystem partners joining the fray. The bottom line is that the technology is now ready for prime time. To get more detail, check out this week’s Fiv...

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

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