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.

High-performance computing has a lot to do with complex calculations performed in parallel. However, in the embedded space, it has different, and potentially more challenging, definitions. To  understand where high-performance computing fits in the industrial IoT sector, I spent this week's Embedded Executives podcast with Michael Duhamel, Vice President at SECO.

The semiconductor content in today’s (and tomorrow’s) automobiles continues to grow. That’s a good thing for lots of people. Unfortunately, that list includes the bad guys, as more end points appear in the vehicle, more entry points become vulnerable to hackers. The question I posed to this week’s Embedded Executive, Andrew Longhurst, Managing Director, Wittenstein High Integrity Systems, is simply, “what do we do about that?” Tune in to find out.  

Many people claim that analog is a dying technology. While I’m not in that camp, I want to get to the bottom of the discussion. Hence, I posed the topic to David Dwelley, a Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at Maxim Integrated. David has a birds-eye view on state-of-the-art analog design. Tune in to hear his response. 

Open source is no longer a fad or something for Makers. As Dave Hughes, the Founder and CEO of HCC Embedded says, “it is now a force in our industry.” If you’re not on the bus, it’s time to get on. To hear everything else Dave had to say about open-source software, check out this week’s Embedded Executive podcast.

Analytics is the key to having a successful IoT platform, particularly in the industrial space. However, analytics doesn’t seem to have the focus in the development community that it should. Why is that so? That’s what I asked Tom Yates, Vice President of Products at Nubix, who deals with this topic on a daily basis. Tune in for more. 

We seem to be on a never-ending ride to reduce power. It seems like whatever the IC vendors can provide, the OEMs want more (or in this case, less). Is that fair? Maybe. Will the cycle continue down a similar path? Probably, but to know for sure, I interviewed Larry Blackledge, General Manager of Qorvo's Programmable Power Management business to see how low we can go. Tune in for more.

5G is coming. 5G is here. 5G is the greatest thing since sliced bread. There is so much information and misinformation regarding 5G that I thought it made sense to bring on an expert who could debunk some of the myths around 5G. In this week’s Embedded Executive interview, I spoke with Sylvia Lu, who is the Senior 5G Technical Lead for 5G at u-blox, as well as a member of the UK5G Advisory Board. Tune in for more. 

Yunsup Lee was part of the RISC-V movement from the ground floor. He was one of the original authors of the spec right from Day 1. Currently, Lee is the CTO of SiFive, one of the leaders in terms of RISC-V IP. But this Five Minutes With…discussion revolves around the Chips Alliance, where Lee is a Board Member. The Alliance has a goal of developing open-source hardware, which dovetails perfectly with the motivation behind RISC-V. Tune in for more.