Embedded Executive Podcast

Are you familiar with model-based systems engineering (MBSE)? I have to admit that I was not familiar with, but it looked like something I should know about. To educate myself, I had a discussion with Marco Leon, the Director of Systems Architecture Engineering at Mercury Systems, in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast. As a relatively new technique, it's designed to reduce your design risk.

When it comes to embedded computers for industrial applications, size does matter—sometimes. Many of the industrial platforms cut a fairly wide berth, so you can take a lot of liberties with the embedded computer board. But for those applications where space is at a premium, systems integrators don’t have the same number of options. One option that’s now available is the Interceptor from BlackPearl Technology. In this week’s Embedded Executives podcast, I spoke to Dave Smith, Co-Founder and VP of Innovation at Black Pearl, and we discussed when and where a platform like this one makes sense.

Processors to handle AI at the Edge are quite complex. However, that hasn’t stopped so many companies from producing their variants. In some cases, they come from the established MCU providers, and in other cases, they come from startups. Kinara fits that latter category. As we discussed in this this week’s Embedded Executives podcast, it’s really hard to differentiate yourself. I asked the company’s CEO, Ravi Annavajjhala, what makes his company stand out amongst some pretty stiff competition.

I have done lots of these Embedded Executive podcasts, a few hundred in fact. This particular podcast goes in a direction I have never gone before, and involves the mafia (yes, you read that correctly). John Costello, who serves as the Corporate Vice President Government Affairs for Microchip Technology, has some stories to tell that involve members of his (literal) family, and their dealings on the dark side. John wrote a book called Executive Hoodlum that’s extremely interesting and we cover some of what he wrote about. Definitely check out this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

For starters, Smith is the largest electronics distributer that I have never heard of. They are a multi-billion-dollar company. One of the strengths of the company is ensuring that its products are real (as opposed to counterfeits). That’s harder than it sounds, but vital to a developer. As we know, fake parts likely don’t provide the same operating characteristics as real parts. To understand how Smith tackles this process, I spoke to the company’s CEO, Kirk Wehby in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

Richard Lind is about seven months into his role as CEO of IAR Systems, one of the leaders in embedded development tools. One of his biggest competitors has a huge advantage—their tool is free! Or is it really? That’s the question I asked of Richard, and he had a very interesting response in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

Texas Instruments is a big company. One thing that’s afforded by a company of its size is a lab that can help the various product groups on their designs. And that’s the role of Kilby Labs at TI. The group is good at assessing risk, understanding whether a product should follow through to full development, and so on. To explain it far better than that, I invited Dr. Jeffrey Morroni, the Director of Power Management R&D for Kilby Labs, at Texas Instruments on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

Artificial intelligence is all the rage. Combine that with the huge amount of video that’s being captured. When you put these two phenomena together, you can (potentially) do some great things. And those great things are done by making use of the analytics that comes from the video after running through an AI engine. Confused? I know that I was, and for that reason, I invited Jaidev Amrite, the Director of Product Management at SparkCognition to be my guest on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast. Jaidev explained what you can actually do and what it takes to get there.

The chip shortage and supply-chain issues are not getting better. In some cases, it might be a simple, inexpensive IC that holds up your production. But it doesn’t matter whether it’s a 50-cent part or a $200 microprocessor. That assembly line treats them equally when the supply runs dry. To that end, the folks at Innoscience, one of the largest suppliers of GaN components, say that they are not experiencing the same issues as competitors (and non-competitors). Why is that the case? That’s where I started with this week’s Embedded Executives podcast, when I interviewed Denis Marcon, General Manager of Innoscience Europe. We went on to discuss other GaN issues as well.

The hardware side of RISC-V is ready for prime time. No one questions that. The case against RISC-V has always been the tools and associated software, aka, the ecosystem. However, is that still a valid argument against RISC-V? That’s the first of many questions I posed to Sailesh Chittipeddi, the Executive Vice President & General Manager of Renesas’ IoT and Infrastructure Business Unit. His company has a lot to potentially gain with RISC-V, so I was interested in hearing his opinion, which comes in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.