Embedded Executive Podcast

We are now about a year into the official launch of PICMG’s COM-HPC standard. The spec launched with a lot of fanfare from the association, many of its members, and from Embedded Computing Design. To see what’s happened over the past year, I invited Christian Eder to join my weekly Embedded Executives podcast. Christian plays a key role within PICMG, serving as Chairman of the COM-HPC working group. Christian is also the Director of Marketing for congatec.

Infineon is undergoing a fairly significant change, in my eyes at least. Whether it’s an intentional move or just one that’s happening through an unintended culture change, there’s no doubt that it is happening. What I mean by this is that, again in my opinion, the company is changing from one with a German culture to one with a Silicon Valley culture. It’s possible (and likely) that the acquisition of Cypress Semi had a lot to do with that. Is this culture shift a good thing? In my opinion, it is. Is it real? To get the answer to that, I interviewed Shawn Slusser, an Infineon Senior Vice President in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

John Deere is pushing the envelope in the farming space. The company is on the leading edge with technologies like autonomous tractors. From my limited knowledge of the farming industry, that seems like it’s beyond what farmers are asking for. But I’ve clearly been misinformed, as the farmers are way ahead of what I realized, partly thanks to innovations from the likes of John Deere. Hear what they are providing in my interview with Joe Liefer, a Senior Product Manager for Autonomy for John Deere’s Intelligent Solutions Group (ISG) in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

WiFi is on the move again. WiFi 6 is becoming more entrenched, but WiFi 7 is just around the corner. Are these new iterations really necessary, or is it just a way to get users to upgrade to the latest and greatest? To that end, I invited Cees Links, the General Manager of Qorvo’s Wireless Business Division to join me for this week’s Embedded Executives podcast. In this episode, Cees runs through all the advantages and tradeoffs associated with each new flavor of WiFi , so designers and consumers can make an educated decision to plan their futures.

Sub-threshold technology has pushed microprocessor power levels down to places we have not seen before.  While it’s not a new technology, but something that Ambiq has been implementing for many years, why haven’t other vendors implemented it, if it’s so promising? That’s the question I started with in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast with my guest,  Ambiq’s Vice President of AI, Carlos Morales.

The discussion of SoC versus ASSP has been going on for as long as these devices have existed. The pendulum seems to shift over time, depending on which applications are hot at the moment (is there currently a killer app?), how much the manufacturing costs are, and a host of other factors. To understand where the discussion sits today, I spoke to Rajinder Cheema, the Senior Vice President of Engineering at Socionext America in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

We’ve been talking a lot lately about what it means to be “real time.” In theory, it’s not something that’s achievable. But in practice, “good enough” is good enough for many applications. Another product to hit the market recently is a real-time database, developed by McObject. When I saw that release, I jumped at the chance to speak to Steve Graves, McObject’s President and CEO, to see if his definition matched mine. Check out this week’s Embedded Executives podcast to hear Steve’s thoughts.

Since we’ve turned the page on a new year, it’s time to make some predictions. I asked Brandon Lewis, the Embedded Computing Design Editor-in-Chief, to join me and make some predictions for the new year. Some are likely expected and some might surprise you. Hear our thoughts in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

Newark recently conducted a poll of Makers and Professional Makers, looking at their board choices, operating environments, architectures, and so on. The results from the study were pretty eye-opening. Hence why I had a discussion with Cliff Ortmeyer, Newark’s Global Head of Technology Product Marketing and Solutions Development. We talked about results of the poll, why the respondents chose to respond they way they did, and whether developers were making choices for the right reasons. Check out our discussion in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

The Connectivity Standards Alliance (CSA) continues to be a force to be reckoned with within our embedded space. And I mean that in a good way. Today, we are discussing the security of consumer devices, which falls under the Matter portion of the CSA. That security design is now complete and the open-source implementation is near-ready.According to Steve Hanna, a Distinguished Engineer at Infineon Technologies, Matter will be raising the security bar to where it needs to be. Obviously, security is a moving target, and the group will continue to evolve the standard.Our second guest, Chris LaPre, Director of Technology for the CSA, speaks from the Alliance’s perspective on what needs to happen to get a large number of influential contributors to agree on a standard that continually keeps the end user in mind. Hear all that and more in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.