Embedded Executive Podcast

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 promoted just after we recorded this podcast!

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 Embedded Executives podcast.

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 more in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast with Bill Merkel,  Vice President of Business Development at USA Firmware.

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 podcast, we discuss, among other things, how the AI ecosystem has evolved, and what users can expect at this point.

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’s Embedded Executives podcast with Fritz Werder leads the Life business for Silicon Labs.

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 understand more about the new device family, I sat down with Steve Tateosian, Senior Vice President of the IoT, Compute, and Wireless Business Unit at Infineon Technologies. Hear from the expert about what choices are available to you in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

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.

Thomas walks me through the issues that are prevalent today, and I learned that those same issues may be in the rearview mirror pretty quickly. Check out this week’s Embedded Executives 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 & Webster Associates and a recruiter for most of the companies that you’re aware of. Check out this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

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 Embedded Executives podcast. Reza is tied pretty closely to this initiative, as his company specializes in implementing security measures.