Embedded Insiders

Send us Fan Mail Armv9 is here, and although it took nearly 10 years to arrive, it comes right at a major inflection point in the semiconductor industry where all of the major chipmakers have started dabbling in processor architectures outside of their heritage. The implications of this are currently being felt in more advanced use cases like the data center and high-performance computing, but the...

Send us Fan Mail In this week’s Embedded Insiders, the Insiders comment on a recent fire that shut down the Renesas Naka semiconductor fab where the company manufactures automotive chips.  Later, Rich is joined again by Zane Tsai, Director of the Platform Product Center at ADLINK Technology, to discuss how logistics companies are being affected by the race to deploy AI at the edge, and insights fo...

Send us Fan Mail During a recorded presentation from  embedded world 2021, Rich and Brandon are joined by Technology Editor Curt Schwaderer, who doubles as Vice President of Engineering at intelligence and security provider Yaana Technologies . The three discuss how the tech industry in particular and connected organizations in general have transitioned from protecting devices from attacks to acce...

Send us Fan Mail With time to market pressures constantly increasing, technology organizations are moving away from traditional waterfall development workflows and towards Agile/DevOps software development practices. Originally introduced in enterprise, IT, and data center contexts, these methodologies have made their way into embedded engineering organizations, but at the potential expense of sof...

Send us Fan Mail Embedded world is just about here, but this year’s event is different – like so many other conferences and trade shows, it’s completely virtual. Embedded Computing Design is the show’s official 2021 North American content partner, so Brandon and Rich have spent extra time thinking about how this new era of interaction has, is, and will affect the electronics industry moving forwar...

Send us Fan Mail In this edition of the Embedded Insiders, Brandon and Rich discuss factors and use cases that have kept the 8-bit MCU alive much longer than anyone expected.  After, Brandon is joined by Steve Kennelly, 8-bit Business Unit Manager, at Microchip Technologies, to continue the discussion. Surprisingly, the company is still developing NEW low cost, low power 8-bit MCUs. But, why? And...

Send us Fan Mail We’ve finally made it to the year 2021 and the Embedded Insiders have five predictions for what we may expect in the embedded space this year. Rich kicks things off with a bold prediction: 2021 will NOT be the year of 5G. Do you agree?  Later, James Kimery, Vice President of Product Management at Spirent Communications , joins Brandon to discuss how research wireless research he w...

Send us Fan Mail Twilio, the publicly traded cloud communications platform, has acquired electric imp, a long-time embedded software and services company. What gives? Well, what gives is that the lines between IT, the data center, embedded and the edge, continue to blur into one big continuum of compute and connectivity. After a brief discussion about education stemming from a recent interview Bra...

Send us Fan Mail In this edition of the Embedded Insiders, Brandon and Rich discuss the semantics of AI and intelligent technology and what qualifies as a smart system these days. Have marketing engines turned these into over used terms? Are they even being used correctly?  Later, the Insiders take a deeper dive into the practicalities of Edge AI with Bill Pearson, the Vice President of the Intern...

Send us Fan Mail In part 2 of the Embedded Insiders’ analysis of recent industry acquisitions, Stacey Higginbotham, a tech industry expert and editor of the eponymous Stacey on IoT blog , joins Brandon and Rich to further the discussion about the ARM/NVIDIA deal. Wait. What did NVIDIA buy? Or better yet, what didn’t they buy? Why didn’t they acquire the entire Arm portfolio? And where is the rest...

Send us Fan Mail It’s all about money! In this edition of the Embedded Insiders, Brandon and Rich break down some major acquisitions, like Arm’s purchase of NVIDIA, as well as AMD potentially buying Xilinx, prompted in part by all the “free money” that’s available in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Later, Jim McGregor, Principal Analyst at Tirias Research, joins the Insiders with his thoughts....

Send us Fan Mail In the early 2000s GM stopped their electric car project. They weren’t cool. In comes Tesla who made the electric car a popular concept. But is the “cool factor” the biggest factor in electric car sales these days? Are electric cars actually better for the environment, and do the majority of buyers really care? Brandon and Rich debate the subject and more in this edition of the em...

Send us Fan Mail SiFive, a pioneer of commercializing the RISC-V instruction set and resulting IP, has announced a number of custom design wins. And a lot of them leverage Arm technology. In fact, SiFive's recent 20G1 release revealed that the company has developed SiFive Insight, debug and trace IP that features native compatibility with? You guessed it. Arm’s CoreSight IP that serves the sa...

Send us Fan Mail In this week’s edition of the Embedded Insiders, Brandon and Rich discuss all of the new programming languages that have entered the embedded universe. This is in large part due to the convergence that IoT has created between IT and embedded developers. Are we getting to the point where we won’t use C language anymore? Or is it here to stay for good?  Later, Nial Cooling, the CEO...

Send us Fan Mail In this edition of the embedded insiders, Brandon and Rich ponder whether RISC-V is taking too long to become a mainstream technology, or if it will even ever be one. Despite being open-source and all of the initial hype, will RISC-V become all that it has so-far been made it out to be? Later, the Insiders are joined by Mark Himelstein, the newly-appointed CTO of RISC-V Internatio...

Send us Fan Mail In this edition of the Embedded Insiders, Brandon and Rich ponder when “enough is enough” in terms of IoT device security. Because implementing robust security is so time consuming and expensive, why haven’t we just created development workflows that make it more costly to NOT use security?  Later, the Insiders are joined by Jeremy Boone, Technical Director of The NCC Group, secur...

Send us Fan Mail In this edition of the embedded insiders, Brandon and Rich discuss how digital twins that reflect physical IoT systems can not only record the status of real-world devices, but simulate how the device could react under certain conditions in the future. And, how these twins can also potentially be used to help inform future designs. Later, the insiders are joined by Brady Benware,...

Send us Fan Mail AI is all the rage these days, and poised to disrupt nearly every industry. In fact it already is, but more because organizations are struggling to integrate new AI personnel, processes, tools, and workflows alongside their existing infrastructure. It’s so bad in fact that a recent IDC survey reported that the majority of companies are failing in their AI initiatives. In this epis...

Send us Fan Mail This week on the Embedded Insiders, Brandon and Rich discuss an age-old controversy: What’s more secure? Proprietary or open-source software? That discussion leads into an interview with Kate Stewart, Senior Director of Strategic Programs at the Linux Foundation, who joins the program to explain how the Zephyr Project responded to 25 vulnerabilities recently uncovered in its open-...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode of the Embedded Insiders, Brandon and Rich continue to probe the impact that COVID-19 is having on the electronics industry today and it’s implications for the future. They begin with a review of recent research published by ByteSnap, “ Navigating COVID-19: The New Normal ,” which takes a snapshot survey of U.K.-based electronics professionals. Are the somewhat opt...

Send us Fan Mail In this edition of the Embedded Insiders, Brandon and Rich wonder how the COVID-19 pandemic has been affecting the tech sector, both from a financial perspective and with regards to the productivity of engineers now working at home. Are those engineers executing, innovating, or just relaxing? Later, Rich interviews Jean Labrosse, formerly a distinguished engineer and software arch...

Send us Fan Mail In this edition of the embedded insiders, Brandon and Rich share their thoughts on the upcoming embedded world trade show in Nuremberg, Germany – focusing on all of the companies that have pulled out due to concerns over the corona virus. After, the embedded insiders are joined by Steve Hanna, senior principal at Infineon Technologies and chair at the Trusted Computing Group. The...

Send us Fan Mail Embedded World 2020 is right around the corner, and the Insiders spend a few minutes forecasting what they expect to see at the show. Some of the main themes they expect are an increased integration of AI and IoT technologies and smarter edge computing nodes based on those technologies. They then get into a semantic disagreement around what constitutes "the edge" and whe...

Send us Fan Mail In this edition of the Embedded Insiders podcast, Brandon and Rich continue their journey into the world of open source, this time by focusing on Z-Wave that was recently donated to the community by Silicon Labs (who acquired the networking technology from Sigma Designs). Later, the Embedded Insiders are joined by Laurens Slats from The Things Industries, who continues the discuss...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode of Embedded Insiders, Brandon and Rich review some of the highlights from the 2020 Consumer Electroncis Show (CES). Most notably, many embedded technology companies and organizations continue to embrace the world of open source, both within their product offerings and in the way they deliver products to market. Later, Wensi Jin and Mark Corless of MathWorks take th...