Zephyr is an open-source operating system that’s designed for applications where Linux is simply too big, from a space or power perspective. Is Zephyr right for your application? How would you even know? And if it is, where do you start?

These are just some of the questions I threw at Kate Stewart, a Senior Director of Strategic Programs for the Linux Foundation, the governing body of Zephyr in this week’s Five Minutes With…discussion.

Zvonimir Bandic wears lots of hats. He is the Senior Director of Hardware Platforms for Western Digital; he’s a Member of the Board of Directors for the RISC-V Foundation, and he’s the Chairman of the Chips Alliance. It’s that latter capacity that we discussed in this week’s Five Minutes With…discussion. The organization focuses on things like open source hardware, software tools, RTL development, and related topics. They will be holding their inaugural workshop in just a few weeks, so it was timely to understand the purpose of the Alliance. And now I do, as will you.

We now have the capability to implement super-specific GPS, far more accurate than what we’re accustomed to today. But do we really need to know exactly where we are, within centimeters, or is the current technology good enough? And assuming you picked the former, how do you actually do that? Those are just some of the questions I asked of Yang Zhao, the CEO of ACEINNA, in this week’s Five Minutes With…discussion.

RISC-V is the new instruction-set architecture that people can use to design microprocessors. Calista Redmond is the newly appointed CEO of the RISC-V Foundation, the group that manages the spec and is putting on seminars and conferences around the world. In this week’s Five Minutes With…discussion, I asked Calista about her plans for the organization, which potentially plays a large role in our industry moving forward.

There seems to be a foundation/association for just about everything in our space these days. Are such institutions necessary? Do they wear out their usefulness? I asked that question of Mike Milinkovich, the Executive Director of the Eclipse Foundation. Of course, he defended his group, but his reasoning was quite interesting. Check out this week’s Five Minutes With…discussion.