Embedded Executive Podcast

The Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) is a regulation designed to enhance cybersecurity for products mainly sold in Europe. It establishes common cybersecurity standards for hardware and software, requiring manufacturers to build security into their products from design through the products’ complete lifecycle. It’s this latter concept that can be troubling, as sometimes devices stay in use for a long, long time. 

So what’s a manufacturer to do? That’s the concept that was on the table for this week’s Embedded Executives podcast with Eystein Stenberg, founder and CTO of Northern.tech.

While most autonomous vehicle focus is on the automobile, Mozee is going in a slightly different direction, no pun intended. Mozee is focused on autonomous buses, or vehicles that transport large numbers of people. As you might expect, such a system has its challenges, in addition to those typically associated with an automobile. What makes the company’s solution different is that it operates in real-time, without the need for “pre-mapping” the city in which the vehicle travels. It does this through its AI engine. Hear more directly from Shawn Taikratoke, Mozee’s CEO, on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

Two technologies seem to be barreling ahead at a rapid pace, and there is likely a convergence coming shortly, if it hasn’t already occurred. I’m referring to space travel and artificial intelligence. But in my limited knowledge, there appears to be a disconnect in this marriage, whereby how could AI make decisions on something it’s never encountered before? 

To boost my limited knowledge, I invited Sakya Dasgupta, the Founder and CEO, EdgeCortix, to be my guest on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast. He has experience in this space (pun intended) and we discussed what’s happening today and what we can expect in the near future.

Designing wearables with integrated AI /ML just got one step easier with Nordic Semiconductor’s acquisition of Neuton.AI. While the two companies had already been working together, you can expect a lot more integration between Nordic’s MCUs and the very low-power AI IP that Neuton.AI has become famous for. 

On this week’s Embedded Executives podcast. I spoke to Øyvind Strom, the EVP of Nordic’s Short-Range Business Unit. He explains why a developer should sit up and take notice, and what the design community can expect from this powerful combination down the road.

The line between a maker and a maker pro is quite fuzzy. In my opinion, the maker wants to build one of something, and likely won’t want to build more than one. The maker pro starts out building one, but knows somewhere down the line that the project could turn into a far larger volume. 

If you fall into that latter group, does that change some of your design decisions, even where you begin? 

Do you start with a Pi, or do you use something that’s more “professional?” 

This is the conversation I had with Okan Saracoglu, the Vice President of Growth at Sixfab. Hear what he had to say on the subject forward, on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

ISO 8800 is a standard aimed at functional safety in automotive applications, pertaining to artificial intelligence. It provides the guidelines for integrating AI systems into any safety-related functions of road vehicles. In full disclosure, I wasn’t aware of this standard, and I was frankly surprised I wasn’t. 

To remedy the situation, I invited Jill Britton, the Director of Compliance at Perforce, onto this week’s Embedded Executives podcast. Jill explained what the standard is all about and which parts of it are key for embedded developers to understand.

Here’s a walk down memory lane. The Eclipse Foundation dates back more than 20 years. Mike Milinkovich, the Foundation’s Executive Director, has held this role since its inception. The role of the foundation and the embedded industry in general has evolved more than anyone could have conceived. 

Stay tuned to hear about some of the issues the Foundation has been involved with and what’s been required to keep the community on par with other areas of the technology landscape. And that includes the ORC working group, which you can learn more about on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

We talk about AI a lot here at Embedded Computing Design, and that’s a huge understatement. What we don’t talk about often is the power required to keep the data centers going, specifically the data centers that form the backbone of all this AI activity. 

When you talk to experts in this space, they’ll tell you that the amount of power needed, specifically the power density, is staggering. One of those experts, Tim Phillips, President, CEO, and Founder of Empower Semiconductor, joined me on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast. He gave some insight into what we need to do to handle the power (and associated heat) issue.

Nordic Semiconductor is certainly one of the leaders in the embedded space regarding microcontroller technology. Frankly, I feel like the company is one of the best-kept secrets. When I had the opportunity to speak with their (sort of) new CEO, I jumped at it. 

Hear my discussion with Vegard Wollan, Nordic’s President and CEO, where he explains some of the moves he has made in his tenure, and what can be expected going forward, on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

Some “experts” in the embedded space will swear that systems based on open-source software or hardware can never be secure. At the same time, others will say that such a notion is pure nonsense.

To get a better feel for the argument and understand what is accurate and what is not, I spoke to Jan Pleskac, the Co-Founder and CTO of Tropic Square, on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

The company is a fabless semiconductor vendor that specializes in secure elements. Jan and I went through the process behind staying secure and the role that open source plays in it.