MultiTech is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year. That’s quite an achievement in our space, where vendors so often get swallowed up by larger vendors or they simply go away. I had the opportunity to discuss this milestone with Matt Sharma, whose dad started the company 50 years ago. In this week’s Embedded Executives podcast, Matt and I discussed what it takes to keep a company vibrant for such a long time.

Like the case with many software products, there are a host of free design tools available for things like GUI development. Crank Software is one vendor that sells such tools. So the obvious question for me was, why should I pay for tools if I can get them for free? This was the first of many questions I asked of Jason Clarke, the founder and vice president of Crank Software in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

Open control systems and open architectures aren’t the mainstream in the industrial sector, but maybe they should be. That’s the opinion of Yuri Chamarelli, a Lead Product Specialist at Phoenix Contact in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast. Hear the reasons why, and see if you agree.

We can talk about embedded security until we’re blue in the face. At some point, the developer has to step up and take charge of the situation. In this week’s Embedded Executives podcast, I interviewed Frédéric Thomas, the Vice President of Technology for Kudelski IoT. We started by looking at the holes in the security infrastructure, and went from there.

You can make a case that LoRa is the perfect medium to outfit a smart building. It may not be able to handle every task, but it can do more than you might think. To that end, I spoke with Byron BeMiller, a Vertical Marketing Director for Smart Buildings at Semtech and also Head of the LoRa Alliance’s Smart Building Working Group in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

The definition of “low power” can differ based on your application. Low power for an industrial system supplier can differ greatly from that of a medical device maker. Regardless, I think we can agree that power levels are coming down, but not at the rate that users and OEMs would like. To that end, the designers at InnoPhase have developed a power-reduction technique for wireless connection devices that’s pretty innovative. That’s where the discussion began in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast with Thomas Lee, a Vice President at InnoPhase.

Neural networks are complex. Mindtech makes tools that help create vision data sets for training these neural nets. In this week’s Embedded Executive podcast with Chris Longstaff, Vice President of Product Management at Mindtech, I discussed what an engineer would do with the data set once in-hand.

Our embedded industry is bursting with standards. One of the more popular ones, especially when discussing industrial specifications, is Industry 4.0. But, we’ve been stuck on 4.0 for quite some time. With that said, what’s next? Is it Industry 4.1? 5.0? Or something else? That’s the question I posed of someone in the know, Dusty Kramer, the recently appointed CEO of Eurotech in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

There are obvious phases of any design. You know them as well as I do, but the one that doesn’t seem to garner its share of attention is test. It could be because test is hard and not well understood. Or it could be because a percentage of engineers feel that test should be handled by the test engineers exclusively. To better understand what’s meant by this process and how it fits into the overall cycle, I spent some time with Joseph Sawicki, Executive Vice President of Mentor IC EDA, in this week’s Embedded Executive podcast.

 The power that’s required to charge electric vehicles is quite high. And when you add wireless charging, the issues grow significantly.

But what exactly are those electric vehicle charging issues, and how do we solve them? And why are people afraid to charge their batteries to 199 percent? That’s just the beginning of the discussion I had with Dr. Phil Lessner, Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer for KEMET in this week’s Embedded Executive interview.