Embedded Executive Podcast

Most of the RISC-V offerings that I’ve seen have been pushing very high performance, with lots of cores and lots of chips. Upbeat Technology is taking a different tack by looking at very low power levels. In my discussion with Jerry Chen, Founder and CEO of Upbeat Technology, he explains the reasons for that approach, and, as you’ll hear, he tells it like it is and explains why the company partnered with SiFive. The applications that make sense for the Upbeat offering include always-on IoT, wearables, drones/UAVs, smart audio, predictive maintenance, and edge-AI sensors, basically anything battery-powered. Hear our discussion on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

It’s not the first time this has occurred, but it is the latest—a previously commercial real-time operating system is now being offered as open source. In this case, it’s SMX from Micro Digital. If you’re wondering, like I was, where the company would choose to go this route, check out this week’s Embedded Executives podcast with Ralph More, the Founder and President of Micro Digital.

There are lots of semiconductor vendors that do a great job of providing AI hardware. But unfortunately, for many of them, their offerings end there, requiring developers to source software and tools from multiple sources. It’s no secret that designing a system with AI is complex enough. Having to go to different vendors for different pieces just adds multiple layers of complexity. Analog Devices is taking a different tack, where they are providing just about everything the developer needs, thanks to its CodeFusion Studio, which includes an IDE, a software development kit, and coding tools. Hear more about it on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast, where I spoke to Rob Oshana, Analog Devices’ Senior Vice President of Software and Digital Platforms.

Every IoT device should comply with the Connectivity Standard Alliance (CSA) Matter standard, but we know that’s not the case. For some developers, doing that is a no-brainer. However, there are some developers who struggle with the process. For that latter group, the CSA recently released a Matter-compliant platform certification that should help them get to market far more quickly. To explain how that works, I spoke to Jon Harros, who leads the Alliance Certification and Testing team at the CSA, on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast. Jon goes through the need for the program, how it’s implemented, and what developers need to know.

Compilers and ADAS aren’t often used in the same sentence. For developers, that anomaly can represent a design challenge, as compilers in general are not designed for this particular application, which also happens to be at the top of the safety and security checklist. To understand how these compilers should be tested and implemented, I spoke to Sjoerd van der Zwaan, the Chief Product Officer at Solid Sands, on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast. Sjoerd explains how and why compilers for ADAS are different from general compilers, and why you need to run your compiler through an appropriate series of tests to ensure compatibility.

AI at the endpoint gets yet another boost from EMASS, a fabless semiconductor company that recently emerged from stealth mode. Having your processing at the endpoint presents a few significant challenges, namely the amount of processing that can be made available and the ability to run from a battery. EMASS has come up with a way to do this a little differently from what’s been done previously. They can attach their RISC-V processing element to any sensor, making the device an AI accelerator. It’s a little difficult for me to put into words here, so check out this week’s Embedded Executives podcast, where I spent some time with Mark Goranson, EMASS’s CEO, who explains it in detail.

No matter what your end device is, be it a light bulb or a driver’s license, it needs to be secure. I don’t think we need to go through the reasons why it needs to be secure. How you do that is becoming increasingly more difficult. And you may be looking at protecting millions of devices, where each one needs its own unique identity. To get a handle on how you would do this, at least where you would begin this daunting task, I spoke to two experts: Patrick Carrier, a Manager for Secure Solutions at Infineon, and Xin Qiu, the Head of Security Solutions at CommScope. On this week’s Embedded Executives podcast, they lay out the need and then the process a developer would follow.

AI is a technology that generally requires a significant amount of power and high compute performance. Hence, it’s typically relegated to the Cloud or to an Edge-based computer.Performing AI at the endpoint has not been feasible for those reasons. With ambiq’s Sub-threshold Power Optimized technology (SPOT), performing AI at the endpoint is a reality. And the doors/applications that it opens are extremely cool. Hear more about it in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast, where I spoke to Ambiq’s Vice President of AI, Carlos Morales. Note that Ambiq just recently released the latest version of neuralSPOT, which now includes key performance enhancements specific to the company’s Apollo5 family, amongst other features, some of which are specific to AI development.

We’ve done podcasts in the past that discussed automating your code documentation. But we haven’t touched much on automating the code generation itself until now. On this week’s Embedded Executives podcast, I spoke to Jonathan Hacker, the Founder and CTO of TeleCANesis, and that’s exactly what they do. We got into the issues of why automated coding is better than manual coding. Then we had a very interesting discussion about why you shouldn’t consider AI for code generation, at least not yet.

Designing a device that incorporates AI can be daunting, for a good reason—it’s very complex. When you push that design out to the Edge, it brings in even more challenges, both on the hardware and software sides of the equation. To understand what these challenges are and where a designer can turn for help, I spoke to Amir Panush, the CEO of CEVA, on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast. He addresses these issues on a regular basis and has a good understanding of what a designer needs to know.