Embedded Executive Podcast

It seems like more and more engineers are graduating from universities, yet we still need more. There are a few reasons for this. First, there’s simply a demand for hardware and software engineers as our devices become “electrified.” And second, the universities are doing a less than stellar job of getting their graduates ready to dive right in. How do we fix these issues? Those are just some of the points we covered on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast, where my guest was Dr. Khaled Benkrid, Arm’s Director of Education and Research, and former college professor.

ESG stands for environmental, social, and governance, and it’s something we are hearing a lot about lately. However, in my role as our industry’s devil’s advocate, I want to know if this is a real thing, or just a company line from some of the players in our industry. To try and vet that out, I spoke to Stacy Mendez, Avnet’s director of Global Strategic Planning and ESG. Stacy explained what ESG means, what Avnet’s take is on it, and why it’s a real thing. Hear what she had to say on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

Speech recognition on an FPGA? That doesn’t sound like the most effective path, but Bill Jenkins, of Achronix had a different opinion. Hear his take on why the FPGA is the right way to go for this application on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

We say all the time that any system can be hacked, and this week’s Embedded Executives podcast guest is someone who can get into your system. Ken Westin, CISO of Panther Labs, is who we'd call a white-hat hacker. He hacks for good reasons, sometimes to follow a bad hacker and return data, and sometimes to help close up holes in a system. Nonetheless, this is an interesting interview and worth a listen. 

Having a standard that everyone can design to makes markets take off. Open source, both hardware and software, is nothing new. But when paired with AI, it is relatively new. Intel is trying to provide that API for people to design to with its OneAPI initiative. Obviously, you can go that route and run with Intel hardware. But you’re not locked into Intel. You can use the hardware of your choice, assuming that hardware manufacturer conforms to the API. Joe Curley, Intel’s Vice President and General Manager of Software Products explains how this works and what it means to the development community on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again—John Deere is a technology leader that sells agriculture equipment, not the other way around. This week, I spoke to Maya Sripadam, a Senior Product Manager at Blue River Technology, a John Deere Company, about autonomous vehicle design. It’s not automobiles, but it’s certainly related. In some ways, agriculture is easier than automotive autonomy, and in some ways it’s more difficult. Check out this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

Gallium nitride technology has been in the news quite a lot over past couple of years. It’s being touted as a far superior alternative to some of the competing technologies, particularly those that are silicon-based. However, there’s been some buzz lately that GaN is not a reliable technology. To get to the truth, I spoke to Denis Marcon, the General Manager of Innoscience Europe on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast. Innoscience is one of the leaders in GaN technology and its components.

Big announcement from the Biden administration—the U.S. Cyber Trust Mark. In its simplest form, it’s a logo/sticker that goes onto any compliant IoT device. In its most complex form, designers need to understand what this standard is all about. Hence, Steve Hanna, a Distinguished Engineer at Infineon and also the Chair of the Product Security Working Group in the Connectivity Standards Alliance (CSA) was my guest on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast. Steve explained what this means today and going forward.

AI is here and it’s everywhere. However, AI is not the end game. AI is used to reach the end game, whatever that happens to be. That’s somewhat of a paradigm shift for today’s design community who appear to be developing for the application of AI, when there really isn’t one. To confirm my thoughts, I spoke to Jérôme Gigot, a senior director of AIoT at Ambarella on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast. Tune in to hear what he had to say.

Compute Express Link, aka CXL, is a low-latency, cache-coherent interconnect that connects processors, memory, and other accelerator devices. It’s built on top of PCI Express. Over the past couple of years, it’s been emerging as the winner in the interface wars. If you are not familiar with this spec, you need to know it, understand it, and potentially design to it. To get a better understanding of this relatively new specification, I spoke to Mark Orthodoxou, the Vice President of Strategic Marketing, SoCs, at Rambus on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.