Embedded Executive Podcast

We have an engineering shortage. Anyone who's familiar with our space wouldn't dispute that. And if you look at the projections, we’re going to need a whole lot more of us going forward. Why is that the case, and more importantly, what are we going to do about it? To try and understand this dilemma and the potential solution(s), I spoke to Marcus Webster, who is the principal of Webster...

Quantum computing raises the potential for anything to be hacked, and that includes government systems. Hence, the people behind the CHIPS Act want to make sure that the money that’s used for semiconductor development is being used in the areas that it deems most important. To understand how that works, I spoke to Reza Azarderakhsh, the Founder and CEO of PQSecure Technologies on this week’s Embed...

Quantum computing can be a very complex area. Many experts will tell you that it could be as long as a decade before quantum computers actually appear on the scenes. This week’s Embedded Executives podcast guest says that his company is providing quantum computing today. Hear it directly from Chris Balance, the co-founder and CEO of Oxford Ionics .

If you’re a consumer, 5G is likely in your universe. If you’re working on the industrial side, you’re likely not seeing 5G at all. And it may be many years before it’s even available in limited deployments. Why is that? That’s the question I asked of Olivier Pauzet, the EVP of Strategy for Sequans Communications in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast .

Sustainability continues to be a topic of interest. First, what does sustainability actually mean? Second, what are some of the industry giants doing about it? In our space, STMicroelectronics would be one of those giants, so I spoke to Mahesh Chowdhary, an STMicroelectronics Fellow and the Senior Director of MEMS Software Solutions, about what’s happening at his company in this week’s Embedded Ex...

Bringing all the different elements together for an AI-based hardware platform is harder than it sounds, especially when you start considering the environmental conditions. Getting it to work in the lab is one thing, but the real world presents challenges you may not have thought of. SparkCognition has developed a test environment that considers everything because they are testing in the field, li...

There are better ways to write embedded code than the traditional methods. Doing it in a visual fashion is one of those ways. But how does that work, and how does it adapt specifically to my hardware? While you might have thought such technology was already available, Duncan Haldane, the CEO of JITX says that’s not the case. Hear what he has to say on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast .

It seems like more and more engineers are graduating from universities, yet we still need more. There are a few reasons for this. First, there’s simply a demand for hardware and software engineers as our devices become “electrified.” And second, the universities are doing a less than stellar job of getting their graduates ready to dive right in. How do we fix these issues? Those are just some of t...

ESG stands for environmental, social, and governance, and it’s something we are hearing a lot about lately. However, in my role as our industry’s devil’s advocate, I want to know if this is a real thing, or just a company line from some of the players in our industry. To try and vet that out, I spoke to Stacy Mendez, Avnet’s director of Global Strategic Planning and ESG. Stacy explained what ESG m...

Speech recognition on an FPGA? That doesn’t sound like the most effective path, but Bill Jenkins, of Achronix had a different opinion. Hear his take on why the FPGA is the right way to go for this application on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast .

We say all the time that any system can be hacked, and this week’s Embedded Executives podcast guest is someone who can get into your system. Ken Westin, CISO of Panther Labs , is who we'd call a white-hat hacker. He hacks for good reasons, sometimes to follow a bad hacker and return data, and sometimes to help close up holes in a system. Nonetheless, this is an interesting interview and wort...

Having a standard that everyone can design to makes markets take off. Open source, both hardware and software, is nothing new. But when paired with AI, it is relatively new. Intel is trying to provide that API for people to design to with its OneAPI initiative . Obviously, you can go that route and run with Intel hardware. But you’re not locked into Intel. You can use the hardware of your choice,...

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again—John Deere is a technology leader that sells agriculture equipment, not the other way around. This week, I spoke to Maya Sripadam, a Senior Product Manager at Blue River Technology , a John Deere Company, about autonomous vehicle design. It’s not automobiles, but it’s certainly related. In some ways, agriculture is easier than automotive autonomy, and in s...

Gallium nitride technology has been in the news quite a lot over past couple of years. It’s being touted as a far superior alternative to some of the competing technologies, particularly those that are silicon-based. However, there’s been some buzz lately that GaN is not a reliable technology. To get to the truth, I spoke to Denis Marcon, the General Manager of Innoscience Europe on this week’s Em...

Big announcement from the Biden administration—the U.S. Cyber Trust Mark . In its simplest form, it’s a logo/sticker that goes onto any compliant IoT device. In its most complex form, designers need to understand what this standard is all about. Hence, Steve Hanna, a Distinguished Engineer at Infineon and also the Chair of the Product Security Working Group in the Connectivity Standards Alliance (...

AI is here and it’s everywhere. However, AI is not the end game. AI is used to reach the end game, whatever that happens to be. That’s somewhat of a paradigm shift for today’s design community who appear to be developing for the application of AI, when there really isn’t one. To confirm my thoughts, I spoke to Jérôme Gigot, a senior director of AIoT at Ambarella on this week’s Embedded Executives...

Compute Express Link, aka CXL, is a low-latency, cache-coherent interconnect that connects processors, memory, and other accelerator devices. It’s built on top of PCI Express. Over the past couple of years, it’s been emerging as the winner in the interface wars. If you are not familiar with this spec, you need to know it, understand it, and potentially design to it. To get a better understanding o...

Energy harvesting has been with us for quite some time, but it has not achieved the lofty goals that industry insiders predicted. However, it’s still making inroads into applications that make the most sense. To understand what those applications are and how it should work, I spoke to Paul Davis, Vice President of Product Management at Atmosic Technologies on this week’s Embedded Executives podcas...

Software-defined storage is a relatively new technology. It does the same job as the large storage box, but without the large storage box. Huh? Yup, that’s right. It didn’t make sense to me at first either, but I went to an expert, Boyan Krosnov, the CTO and co-founder of StorPool , to get an explanation. Check it out on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast .

We talk a lot here about Edge-based AI and all the things that it can accomplish. But that leaves out a significant portion of the market, that being Cloud-based AI and machine learning. According to one expert, Christina Mongan, the Director of Emerging Technologies on the Innovation Ecosystem and Emerging Technologies team at Unisys, Cloud-based AI is experiencing significant growth. To understa...

We talk a lot here about Edge-based AI and all the things that it can accomplish. But that leaves out a significant portion of the market, that being Cloud-based AI and machine learning.  According to one expert, Christina Mongan, the Director of Emerging Technologies on the Innovation Ecosystem and Emerging Technologies team at Unisys, Cloud-based AI is experiencing significant growth. To underst...

A few years ago, businesses reaped big benefits from federal tax cuts. However, that money needed to come from somewhere. Unfortunately, it didn’t work out exactly how the Fed expected, and it’s putting the clamps on some of the smaller companies in our engineering space. To understand exactly what that means and the effect it’s having and will continue to have in our space, I spoke to Jeff Hibbar...

Fast-charging an end device like a smart phone in under 10 minutes using Gallium Nitride (GaN) power components is awesome. However, it’s not as great as it sounds, for a few reasons. First, if you don’t have the latest and greatest battery technology, you may be doing damage to your battery. In addition, most of our phones are limiting the speed at which the battery can be charged, negating the a...

DRAM is DRAM, right? There’s no difference from manufacturer to manufacturer. If that’s your take, you’ll likely find yourself in trouble when it comes to your design’s memory subsystem. As Frank Henville, a Technical Manager at Apacer, told me during this week’s Embedded Executives podcast , they are quite different. If you don’t believe me, I suggest you give it a listen.

Digital RF is something you don’t hear a lot about, but it is being deployed in some of our embedded systems, including those that live at the Edge of the IoT. But, is it really digital? The technology can be somewhat confusing, so to get to the heart of the matter, I spoke with Massoud Tohidian, the CTO and Managing Partner of Qualinx B.V. , a company that specializes in this digital RF. Check ou...