Yay! Another wireless standard. That’s just what we need, because the landscape isn’t already crowded enough. Do I sound cynical? Maybe. It depends on your perspective. WiFi HaLow is a WiFi-like standard that comes with its own set of benefits. I’ll let you decide whether there’s a place for another wireless standard after you listen to this week’s Embedded Executives podcast with Vahid Manian, Chief Operating Officer of Morse Micro ....
Oct 14, 2020•11 min
The company formerly known as National Instruments is known simply as NI. Is that a big deal? Maybe, depending on who you ask. So I asked Carla Piñeyro Sublett, NI’s Chief Marketing Officer and General Manager of the company’s Portfolio Business. As expected, there’s far more to it than a simple name change. Tune in to this week’s Embedded Executives podcast to learn what it actually means.
Oct 07, 2020•10 min
We love our crystal balls, especially as we get into the later part of the year. I can make all the predictions I want, but my job doesn’t typically depend on whether my predictions are accurate. That’s not the case with product management folks, such as Ellen Boehm, who is the Senior Director of IoT Product Management for Keyfactor . Ellen has to determine what markets are going to be hot and why when it comes to IoT. I ask her to share of those details on this week’s Embedded Executives podcas...
Sep 30, 2020•9 min
I think it’s awesome when some of the bigger vendors in our space help fund start-ups. One example of that is Maxim Ventures , an arm of Maxim Integrated . The investment group is funding a bunch of startups in the medical space. You go into these things knowing that some of your investments are going to pay off and some aren’t. But if you pick a big-time winner, it can pay off in spades. Maxim Ventures has already seen some level of success, as Chris Neil, a Senior Vice President of Maxim Ventu...
Sep 23, 2020•12 min
Living at the Edge can be tricky. That’s the Edge of the IoT that I’m referring to. When you’re one of the leading providers of microprocessors, as NXP clearly is, you have lots of questions that must be addressed. Two big ones concern security and AI. In this week’s Embedded Executives podcast , I spoke to NXP’s Ron Martino, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Business Line Edge Processing, to see hear the company’s responses to those important questions....
Sep 16, 2020•19 min
RISC-V gets a lot of attention as an open-source ISA. Is that attention warranted? The answer, unfortunately, is that it depends. It depends on what problem you’re trying to solve, your familiarity with the tools, your design window, and your engineering talent. The aspect I wanted to confirm was whether the ecosystem is ready for prime time, because as you know, no matter how great your silicon is, if you can’t program it, you’re not going to get very far. One IC vendor that’s sticking his prov...
Sep 09, 2020•8 min
Software is becoming the new firmware. If you believe that, as Bob Scaccia, President and CEO of USA Firmware does, we are at the beginning of a new era, and we had better be prepared for it. What the heck does all that mean? To understand it better, I asked Bob to be my guest on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast .
Sep 02, 2020•11 min
AI at the Edge is now in vogue. But it presents a fundamental problem in that higher compute performance is needed, yet there are many constraints at the Edge, including size, weight, power, and cost. Each of those constraints presents its own unique problem. To understand how to design at the Edge, I spoke to Steven Wu, Vice President of the Research and Development Center at DFI in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast ....
Aug 26, 2020•8 min
I think the embedded industry and its associated technology is very cool. Call me a geek if you must. But every once in a while, I come across a technology that takes “cool” to a completely different level. That occurred this week when I interviewed Florian Bohn, the Co-Founder and CEO of GuRu Wireless. The company is close to commercializing wireless charging, where the charging is done at a distance of a few feet. Check out this week’s Embedded Executives podcast and let me know if you agree w...
Aug 19, 2020•11 min
Synaptics just made a hefty acquisition if you’re a player or follower of the IoT space. The company acquired the Wireless Connectivity division of Broadcom. To understand what that means and how it can affect the embedded space, I invited Vineet Ganju, a Vice President at Synaptics as my guest on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast . The biggest takeaway for me is that this space is about to get a little more interesting....
Aug 12, 2020•9 min
SECO USA does not produce ventilators. However, its customers do. As a result, SECO USA forged a partnership to produce, manufacture, and donate those ventilators to needy hospitals in the US. It’s great to see things like this, when so many people are in need during the COVID-19 pandemic. As Greg Nicoloso, the CEO of SECO USA explained, the company doesn’t want to be a medical-device supplier, but they do want to be a supplier to the companies that supply medical devices. Greg does a great job ...
Aug 05, 2020•7 min
The Wi-SUN Alliance has been around for nearly a decade. The group was formed to develop testing and certification standards for connecting to IoT networks. It has its own wireless spec, which may or may not be confusing, depending on who you are and who you’re talking to. To eliminate the confusion for me and our readers, I interviewed Phil Beecher, President of the Wi-SUN Alliance in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast . Thankfully, he set me straight....
Jul 29, 2020•10 min
The goal of the Embedded Executives podcast is to educate our readers about the issues that are of concern to a design engineer/developer. One executive that’s seen just about every situation a developer might encounter is Rory Dear, the Managing Director of DSL. As such, I ran through a litany of issues with Rory, getting his opinion on everything from NRE to open source.
Jul 23, 2020•6 min
5G requires more radios. Playing devil’s advocate, does that mean there are many more points of failure? Seems obvious, doesn’t it? That’s what I asked Piyush Sevalia, an Executive Vice President at SiTime , who joined me for this week’s Embedded Executives podcast .
Jul 15, 2020•11 min
Tracing of products is an important function. It can be used for everything from property loss to food and medicine whereabouts, and lots of stuff in between. Another interesting application for tracing, especially in our new normal, is knowing when people are practicing social distancing. Wiser Systems specializes in tracing, so I wondered whether its technology could be used to track people. That’s where the conversation started with Logan Maxwell, the company’s Director of Technical Sales in ...
Jul 08, 2020•6 min
There is an explosion of data, thanks to COVID-19. I heard that recently, and it surprised me. I could not understand the relationship between the two, so I went to someone who has to deal with that huge increase, Virtium . My guest on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast is Jacques Issa, a Senior Vice President at the company. And once he explained it to me, it was somewhat of a “Duh!” moment....
Jul 01, 2020•8 min
Different vendors are doing different things to cope with the COVID-19 pandemic. Many of them are doing their part to help get us through this awful time. One of those is SiFive , a fabless semiconductor company specializing in the RISC-V instruction set architecture. Hear what they are doing to help society in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast .
Jun 24, 2020•9 min
The LoRa Alliance is a fairly dynamic organization, as projects appear to be progressing nicely. The organization began with just a handful of vendors and has now grown to more than 500. To that end, Dave Kjendal, CTO and Executive Vice President of Engineering at Senet , has just joined the Alliance’s Board of Directors. It seemed like a good time to speak to Dave to hear what his ideas and direction are for the Alliance. Dave is my guest on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast ....
Jun 17, 2020•7 min
If you’ve been in the industry for a while, you likely know that we continually oscillate between more compute power at the edge and a more centralized computer. Is there a valid reason for that? That’s the question I asked of Kristin Russell, President of Global Services at Arrow Electronics in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast .
Jun 10, 2020•11 min
Many pundits say that the key to neutralizing the COVID-19 virus is testing, lots of testing. That’s easier said than done, unless you believe what the technology experts at SensiML are saying. They claim that with enough data in hand, they can tell you whether you have the infection simply by coughing into a microphone. And the test should produce results that are about 90% accurate. Wow! To be clear, this does not meet the requirements of a clinical tool, but it’s a fantastic start. When I hea...
May 28, 2020•11 min
The AMPERE Project is a three-year initiative run out of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center. It’s being done by a combination of universities and industry. The goal is to ensure that embedded systems are being maximized, using the technology that’s typically employed by today’s supercomputers. To help our audience understand exactly what this is all about, and what they should know about it, I spoke to Eduardo Quinones, a senior researcher at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, on this week’s ...
May 27, 2020•13 min
In our Special Edition of the Embedded Executive podcasts , we are interviewing execs to see how their engineering teams are dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic. We are looking at companies in different parts of the world, and big companies and small companies. In this interview with Sasha Wolloch, President of Raltron Electronics , we get a peek at how it’s going in my home state of Florida....
May 21, 2020•11 min
Moore’s Law has been around for a long time—around 50 years. It says that transistor count will double every 18 months. Many “experts” have predicted that it is coming to an end. Some of those predictions have already proven false. But what’s the real answer: when will it end? That’s the basis of this week’s Embedded Executives podcast , where I speak to Thomas Smelker, the Vice President and General Manager of Custom Microelectronics Solutions at Mercury Systems ....
May 20, 2020•11 min
It’s very clear that different parts of the country and the world are dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic in different ways. That’s mostly dictated by local governments and the severity of the pandemic in a given area. In this Special COVID-19 Edition of Embedded Executive , I spoke to someone who lives and works in eastern Pennsylvania, that being Bryan Muzyka, a Manager at Advanced Cooling Technologies (ACT). This is an area that is less affected than others, but nonetheless, the company is doi...
May 14, 2020•7 min
Device security is a key concern for everyone from developers to end-product suppliers to end users. Sometimes it takes some extreme measure to ensure the security of your device. Those extremes include quantum-safe cryptographic solutions, which is what is provided by PQ Secure , a relatively new company. In this week’s Embedded Executives podcast , I spoke to Reza Azarderakhsh, President of PQ Secure and he explained to me how this technology works and why it’s necessary in our current environ...
May 13, 2020•7 min
Security has stepped up in some areas. But that’s not good enough—it has to step up in all areas. That couldn’t be any more important than it is today as we try to get through this terrible period that’s dominated by COVID-19. In light of that, I asked Louis Parks, the CEO of Veridify Security what need to happen to really lock down our systems. Check out this week’s Embedded Executive podcast ....
May 06, 2020•10 min
During this pandemic, most people are focused on the U.S., or more likely, their own specific region of the country. But pandemic by definition means something that’s global. I decided to check in with a different part of the world. In this Special COVID-19 Edition of Embedded Executive , I spoke to Stefan Skarin, the CEO of IAR Systems , who lives and works in Sweden.
May 04, 2020•10 min
Mergers and acquisitions are a way of life in the embedded, semiconductor, and electronics industries. The current pandemic has altered that trajectory somewhat, but not as much as you might expect. Business is going on and, thankfully, there’s no end in sight. Such concepts were the topics of discussion in this week’s Embedded Executive podcast, where I interviewed Syed Alam, who is the Managing Director of Strategy and Consulting at Accenture ....
Apr 29, 2020•10 min
Different parts of the country and the world have been hit in different ways by the COVID-19 pandemic. In our Special Edition of the Embedded Executive podcasts, we are trying to understand how different groups are dealing with the issue, strictly from a work/engineering perspective. In this interview, I spoke with Thomas Fowler, Vice President of Central Engineering at Silicon Labs . Fowler is based in Austin, TX.
Apr 27, 2020•9 min
Open source is pretty close to “the norm” today. Aside from the military and a few other applications, developers don’t think twice about pulling down some open-source code and inserting it into their design. Is that a good thing? That’s the question I asked of Gurjot Singh, CEO of Lynx Software in this week’s Embedded Executive podcast .
Apr 22, 2020•11 min
