Embedded Executive Podcast

Medical wearables can greatly enhance the quality of life for many people. This can be done by instantly accessing medical information and potentially alerting a professional, or simply tracking stats on an individual. According to Andrew Burt, the Director of Product Line Management of Digital Healthcare at Analog Devices , his company has produced a kit for developers who are coming up with idea...

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

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

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

AI MCU vendors have mostly been putting themselves into two camps when it comes to the ecosystem. On one side, the vendor is providing everything themselves. In the other camp, the vendor is relying on partners and the community at large to provide the ecosystem. I recently spoke to Steve Tateosian, SVP of Industrial MCUs, IoT, Wireless, and Compute Business at Infineon, as the company just announ...

In a rare move, I had two guests join me for this week’s Embedded Executives podcast , but for a good reason. I was joined by Mohammed Dogar, Vice President and Head of Global Business Development and Ecosystem at Renesas Electronics , and Sakya Dasgupta, Founder and CEO of EdgeCortix . I asked them to join me together because they have partnered on some interesting Edge AI technologies. We walked...

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

Do you understand the metrology that applies to semiconductor manufacturing? I know I certainly didn’t, and found out how little I knew about this essential technology when I spoke to David Doyle, the President and Managing Director of Heidenhain Corp . While mostly applying to semiconductors, the technology can be deployed on any manufacturing platform. But semiconductor manufacturing has to be s...

The LoRa Alliance recently conducted a user study to see how far LoRaWAN technology has penetrated into the community. If you’re not familiar, LoRaWAN is a low-power wide-area network that has a range that can be measured in miles. I wanted to understand what the results of the user study showed. Do developers feel confident in deploying the technology? How does it work globally? To understand mor...

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

Have you ever heard of an isolator without a power supply? I hadn’t either, until now, sort of. That’s not exactly what Infineon is launching, but it’s close enough that I needed to have a conversation with Daniel Callen, Infineon’s Sr. Manager in the Power IC Group to understand exactly what the company is launching. If your application is in solid-state relays, industrial automation (PLCs), or c...

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

There’s a new sheriff in town when it comes to the Z-Wave Alliance , a newly formed standards development organization. The new Chairman of the Board of Directors at the Z-Wave Alliance is Avi Rosenthal, whose day job is the Managing Partner of bluesalve partners . I know Z Wave has been around for quite some time, but the Alliance was previously a manufacturer-owned group, and now it’s independen...

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

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

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

Timing devices within embedded systems are likely the most important components that you don’t know anything about. That’s a paraphrase from Piyush Sevalia, a Vice President at SiTime , and it’s certainly very true. When you get into 5G applications, the effects are often working against you, like use in extreme temperatures, or in ruggedized applications. This makes the tolerances even more diffi...

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

Are you familiar with Raspberry Pi ? Of course you are. But are you aware of all the things that you can do with it, or should do with it?  First, if you think it’s a low-compute-power board, you are mistaken. Second, if you think you can’t go to production with a Pi, you’d be mistaken again. If you don’t believe me, listen to what Eben Upton, the Founder of Raspberry Pi had to say in this week’s...

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

When it comes to writing code, we have a manpower problem. While that’s true for most aspects of the embedded engineering/development space, it’s particularly true for those folks writing firmware, which is one of the most critical, yet least glamorous parts of our profession. What’s the solution? Is it AI, to have the code written for us? That’s one of the potential solutions.  Listen to a few mo...

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

Wearable medical devices are poised to take off. I mean, really take off, thanks to a few different drivers, such as the aging population, the pandemic, and some concessions from the insurance companies. Manufacturers are ready to make these devices available, in a huge way. Think hundreds of millions. And if each one of those has an MCU, that’s a lot of MCUs. I got much more in depth in this week...

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

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