Embedded Executive Podcast

Synopsys is all in on generative AI, and it’s putting its money where its mouth is by creating a Center for Generative AI within the company. Being that I had no idea what this meant, how it would work, or what it would mean to the industry, I invited the Center’s Executive Director, Stelios Diamantidis, to join me on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast. He laid out what the Center looks like today, and what it will mean to the entire industry going forward.

Understatement: Raspberry Pi is popular with the embedded community.

Myth: Raspberry Pi is not a secure platform.

I believed in that myth until a recent conversation with Alex Kaay, the CTO and co-founder of Zymbit. The beauty of the Pi is in its simplicity, but don’t equate simplicity with unsecure. Alex walked me through why people's beliefs are what they are, and more importantly, why those beliefs are misguided. Check out this week’s Embedded Executives podcast and see if you’re a believer.

One area of technology that many vendors and technologies are gunning for is smart metering, whether commercial or residential electric meters, water meters, or something else.

The number of potential meters is HUGE. But which technology makes the most sense for this application? As you might expect, it depends on who you talk to. For this podcast, I spoke to Phil Beecher, the President and CEO of the Wi-SUN Alliance. Phil explained why Wi-SUN makes the most sense in this week’s Embedded Executives 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 ideas on how to pull in this data and then what to do with it. It’s pretty amazing what can be done, and it’s not nearly as hard as you might think. Check out this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

Correction: The ADI wearable device referred to in the podcast has received FDA 510(k) clearance, not FDA approval.

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 us. On this episode, I spoke to Mark Montierth, a Corporate VP and the General Manager of Micron’s Mobile Business Unit.

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 Product Management Engineer at Rohde & Schwarz, on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

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 and the effect it could have on an engineer’s future, I brought back Marcus Webster, who is the principal of Webster & Webster Associates. Marcus last spoke to us about the engineering shortage. Check out this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

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 announced a bunch of AI MCUs and I wanted to find out which camp he was residing in. Find out on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

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 through the Renesas vision and strategy for AI and machine learning (ML) and how that led to the partnership with EdgeCortix. More importantly, we discussed what that means to the design engineer and the embedded community at large.

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 Pierre Gal, Head of Product Development at The Embedded Kit.