Embedded Executive Podcast

Five years ago, the experts said that autonomous-drive vehicles were five years out. Now, five years later, they still appear to be five years out? Why is that? To try to get to the bottom of the issue, I spoke to someone who knows far more about the technology than me, Stan Schneider, the CEO of RTI on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

Silicon Carbide (SiC) is a hot technology. The topic/technology seems to be coming up more and more. I was curious as to why that was the case, so I spoke to someone who is an expert on the subject for this week’s Embedded Executives podcast. That expert is Simon Keeton, the EVP and GM of onsemi’s Power Solutions Group.

Intel recently launched a new addition to its Sapphire Rapids scalable processor family. The addition delivers a performance boost, but as you might expect, it’s a whole lot more involved than that. To understand what the announcement means to the embedded developer, I chatted with Vik Malyala,  Managing Director and President of the EMEA Division at Supermicro. In this week’s Embedded Executives podcast, Vik explains how these changes, mostly positive, affect both the hardware and software designs of the system.

If you’ve been in the embedded space for any length of time, you’re likely familiar with the ThreadX real-time operating system, which was a product of Express Logic. That company was acquired by Microsoft, and it’s President, Bill Lamie, went along with the team to Microsoft…until now. Bill is back out on this own, with a new company (PX5) and a new OS, called the PX5 RTOS. How this OS differs from the competition and how a new start-up company can dislodge some of the large competitors was topic du jour in my discussion with Bill in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

Security, security, security. You’d think by now that the process for security would be so automated and automatic we wouldn’t be having these same discussions as to why designers are reluctant to design it in, or what applications really require it. Alas, here we are.To try, yet again, to understand why we still have the same discussions over and over, I spoke to Paul Chawla, the CEO of Eurotech. Eurotech likes to live on the Edge of the IoT, so they well understand the need for advanced security at the Edge, in the Cloud, at the endpoint. Hear what Paul had to say on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

5G brings a lot of promise to the embedded space, in addition to many other spaces. This week’s Embedded Executives podcast guest knows far more about 5G than most people. Paul Stager, EdgeQ’s Director of Engineering, and I talked about when it’s coming, how it’ll be deployed, and what designers need to know to avoid the potential minefield that 5G has become.

Bob Scaccia, the President and CEO of USA Firmware, knows more about firmware than anyone I’ve ever come across. And speaking of firmware, it is an art that does not get nearly the attention  it should, and for a long list of reasons. In this podcast, i'll go through those reasons and a lot more firmware-related issues. Tune in.For those of you who agree with Bob Scaccia's perspective, here’s his ask: help him, help us, help our firmware community by coming together and consistently explaining why firmware matters. If we align and educate from the same viewpoint, we can turn firmware from invisible to visible, and give the discipline the respect it deserves in this era of mass device and IoT adoption. Only acting in unity can we educate the media and the general public as well. On your mobile device, text yesfirmware to 877-379-4135 join the movement to make firmware visible.

The chip shortage is getting better. It’s getting worse. No, it’s getting better. These are the responses I continue to hear. To hopefully arrive at the truth, I went to someone in "the know", and that's Peggy Carrieres, Avnet’s Global Vice President of Sales Enablement and Supplier Development. As a distributor, Avnet knows as well as anyone what’s available and what’s not. Hear what Peggy had to say on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

As an embedded developer, does a “common platform” reduce your ability to innovate? That’s a connect and a theory I discussed with Ron Martino, NXP’s Executive Vice President of Global Sales. NXP is offering such a strategy to its community, so I was curious to hear more about it, which I did on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

Macronix is a memory vendor who claims to offer “memory-centric computing.” When I heard about this concept, I wondered if it was something real, or just marketing spin. To find out, I went to the source,  Macronix and invited Anthony Le, Vice President at Macronix America, to be my guest on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.