Embedded Insiders

Send us Fan Mail Power is key in any embedded system—literally. You will not find an embedded system that does not contain some sort of power subsystem. However, people tend not to put much emphasis on that portion of the embedded design. Why is that? Beats me, so I asked Chris Jones, a Director at Artesyn Embedded Technologies in this week’s Five Minutes With…discussion. And did he ever come up w...

Send us Fan Mail Energy harvesting is not a new concept – solar panels have been around for a long time, and even mechanical watches have had motion-capture systems to wind the mainspring since Rolex invented “Perpetual” movement. However, recent advances in circuit efficiency have made other forms of low-power energy harvesting viable, as they can use the microamps of current provided. Today one...

Send us Fan Mail There are holes in IoT security. I don’t think anyone disputes that. Is it a big problem or a small problem? Unfortunately, the answer depends. Knowing where to start and what path to take is a tricky one, in part because different people will point you in different directions. To (hopefully) steer you straight, I discussed the topic with a recognized security expert, Brent Wilson...

Send us Fan Mail The space where the electronics meets the mechanics ends up being a place of disconnect. Who owns that domain, the mechanical engineer or the electrical engineer? Good question, and that’s where I started the discussion with Michael Randt, Founder and CEO of Trinamic in this week’s Five Minutes With…discussion. As the IoT proliferates, particularly in the industrial, automation, a...

Send us Fan Mail APEC 2019 is happening March 17-21 in Anaheim, CA. The Embedded Insiders’ very own Alix Paultre, a seasoned veteran of the power electronics industry, will be attending the Applied Power Electronics Conference and moderating one of the sessions there. Tune in as he elaborates on what attendees will learn at the show this year and what it’s all going to mean for the future of the e...

Send us Fan Mail The 2019 Embedded World Conference and Exhibition was here and gone in a flash, once again setting records for attendance and innovation. The Embedded Insiders Rich Nass, Brandon Lewis, Alix Paultre, and Laura Dolan dedicate this special episode to some of the most groundbreaking solutions on display at this year’s event, which also happened to be the recipients of Embedded Comput...

Send us Fan Mail Connectors, cables, etc. are a vital piece of the embedded system, but are often (too often?) taken for granted. There’s clearly a lot going on in that space that designers should know about. To connect the dots, I spent some time with Matthew Burns, a Director at Samtec, a guy who lives and breathes connectors. Check out this week’s Five Minutes With…discussion. For more informat...

Send us Fan Mail Ada and RISC-V? Yup, that’s exactly what’s going on, as nVidia has selected Ada to run on its RISC-V core. What does that mean for the future of Ada? That’s the question I started with this week’s Five Minutes With…discussion with Quentin Ochem, a Director at AdaCore, one of the leaders in the Ada programming language. For more information, visit embeddedcomputing.com

Send us Fan Mail This week on Embedded Insiders, we were joined by Derek Hunt, Director of Certification for LoRa Alliance and Certification Committee Chair. He shed some light on what’s currently going on in the low power area networking space. We discussed how LoRaWan is being deployed worldwide, the certification aspects involved, identifying the classes of operation and Worldwide Wake Up. LoRa...

Send us Fan Mail The Embedded Insiders are headed to Embedded World next week. To make sure we maximize our time, we hopped on the phone with Axel Sikora, who is the Chairman of the Embedded World Conference. He’s also in tune with what’s happening on the exhibitor side. Whether you’re headed over to Nuremberg, Germany for the big event or not, you’ll be interested in what Axel has to say about th...

Send us Fan Mail Artificial intelligence is supposed to make your life easier, whether it’s in a consumer setting or an industrial setting. Edge computing, which is the on-premise compute component, is growing in its potential. Edge devices started as simple sensors and now they constitute complete compute platforms, in many cases. According to Jonathan Luse, General Manager of Product Planning fo...

Send us Fan Mail Obsolescence is something that many vendors dread. But fear not, help is out there. Just because a chip or a board is no longer available from your supplier, you may be able to find a replacement part, and you don’t need to build it yourself. Vendors like GDCA specialize in replacing parts that are no longer available. How do they do that, and is it a wise choice to continue with...

Send us Fan Mail Smart cities is a term we’ve been throwing around for a while now. But what’s really behind the drive to add intelligence to our roads, buildings, street lights, etc? That’s the first question I asked of this week’s Five Minutes With…discussion with Ian Aaron, the CEO of Ubicquia, and that was the easy part. The harder part is how you actually do it, which was my follow-up questio...

Send us Fan Mail Low-power wide-area networks (LPWANs) are a necessary component in many IoT or industrial IoT applications. You already know there are many options when it comes to your LPWAN of choice. Today, we’re taking a look at LoRaWAN, one of those choices, and the one that seems to be moving at the fastest pace. The LoRa Alliance, the group that supports the technology recently announced a...

Send us Fan Mail A funny thing happened on the way to the 5G rollout. Some claims were made early on that are turning out to be not true. In fact, they’re so far from reality that you can’t see them in any crystal ball worth gazing into. In this week’s edition of the Embedded Insiders, Brandon Lewis and Rich Nass look at what’s real, what’s not and what’s going to happen sometime soon (not much)....

Send us Fan Mail The automobile presents a challenge for all types of electronics due to the heat and bouncing around that takes place, specifically under the hood. Memory, while not always at the forefront of a designer’s mind, is subject to those same conditions and needs to not be an afterthought. To understand the difficulties as well as the options, I invited Anthony Le, a Senior Director at...

Send us Fan Mail Attendance may have been down at the 2019 Consumer Electronics Show, based on observed foot traffic alone. But, that didn't stop electronics vendors from innovating at the highest levels. From artificial intelligence in automotive and consumer vision systems to ubiquitous voice recognition and more, the Embedded Insiders got what they bargained for and then some at CES 2019....

Send us Fan Mail Bluetooth Mesh has a huge upside in my opinion. But when is it going to be ready for prime time? Or is it already? And what about competitive media, like ZigBee or Wi-Fi? These are just some of the questions I threw at Mahendra Tailor, a Technology Leader at Laird Technology in this week’s Five Minutes with…discussion. For more information, visit embeddedcomputing.com

Send us Fan Mail You can’t build an embedded system without power. Plain and simple. Hence, embedded developers need to be up to speed on the latest power-related technologies. The key attribute that needs to be discussed with respect to power is efficiency. And that’s the topic I discussed with Harold Blomquist, President and CEO of Helix Semiconductors in this week’s Five Minutes with…discussion...

Send us Fan Mail The holidays are over, we’ve rung in the New Year, so it must be time for CES, ready or not. The Embedded Insiders (Rich Nass and Brandon Lewis) are definitely ready for the exciting Consumer Electronics Show, which seems to get crazier every year. Maps are downloaded, plans are made, sneakers are purchased. In this edition of our podcast, we give you a glimpse of where our travel...

Send us Fan Mail As the calendar flips to 2019, embedded processor companies continue to ramp up their AI and machine learning offerings. Two leading processor vendors are doubling down on different architectures to capture these sockets, with Intel betting on Movidius vision processors and (formerly Altera's) FPGA technology and NVIDIA continuing to deliver GPU-based solutions. Tune in as th...

Send us Fan Mail The RISC-V Foundation held its Silicon Valley Summit last week. From sheer numbers alone, the open-source instruction-set architecture (ISA) known as RISC-V is gaining momentum in a pretty big way. And the announcements from the event were aplenty. Two big ones, from Western Digital (WD) and NXP (sort of, through the Open-ISA.org) prove that it’s all about the ecosystem and both v...

Send us Fan Mail Asset tracking has become an industry on its own thanks to so many new and inexpensive technologies. Whether it’s food, meds, or other valuables, there’s no reason not to know exactly where your shipment is at any given time. In addition, you could know the condition of that asset at any given time. To hear what the options are today, I spoke to Dr. Elaine Rideout, Founder and CEO...

Send us Fan Mail The RISC-V ISA has the potential to be a dominant player in the embedded, IoT, and industrial spaces, just to name a few. But before any architecture can take off, it needs a solid ecosystem behind it. The Open-ISA.org initiative, launched today, is taking steps to ensure that that ecosystem starts and stays on the correct path. In this week’s Five Minutes with…discussion, I speak...

Send us Fan Mail Cloud connectivity is pretty straightforward. You contact AMS or Microsoft, or another provider. You download their tools, and you’re done. Well, maybe it’s not so simple, and that’s where the middleware provider comes in to play. Or do they, as the role of middleware can be a confusing one. To better understand where all the pieces fit, I spoke to Hugo Fiennes, CEO of Electric Im...