Embedded Executive Podcast

When you’re looking for somebody with a bird’s eye view of the electronics industry, there aren’t too many people with a better handle on things than the CEO of Avnet, Phil Gallagher. As my guest on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast, I went through a host of issues related to the industry, from the pandemic to the life of an up and coming engineer, to how a company can survive for 100 years.

Security is vital. However, there are many different ways to approach security. There’s hardware security and software security, but those vague descriptors don’t even scratch the surface on all the different implementation methods. Attaching your security to the MCU is the method of choice for Crypto Quantique, a startup in this space. To understand exactly what that means and how it works, I spoke to Shahram Mossayebi, the company’s CEO and Co-Founder, for this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

Just when you thought you had plugged all the holes, more vulnerability points pop up. Actually, in the case of the consumer IoT, they were there all along, just far less publicized. In the big scheme of things, having an individual get hacked is a big deal, but usually just for that one person. However, if you hack multiple people, you could be getting to a point where it’s a big deal for more than one individual. Phil Attfield, the CEO of Sequitur Labs, has a pretty handle on this and understands how and why every node needs to be secured, and that’s what we discussed in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

FPGAs represent a comfort zone for many design engineers. It’s not as bad as “if all I have is a hammer, every problem is a nail,” but you can see how the analogy might fit. Are FPGAs appropriate for mission-critical applications? They could be, if they’re deployed properly. Unfortunately, that’s not always the case. Hear more about this topic in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast with Terry Stratoudakis, the Co-founder and Managing Principal at ALE Consultants.

Wind River has been king of the RTOS hill for a long time. We can debate whether they are still the reigning king. But now, since last February, the company finds itself under new leadership, with the appointment of Kevin Dallas as President and CEO. And the company is undergoing a transformation. That transformation isa into a systems company, one that looks far beyond the RTOS. Hear it right from the horse’s mouth in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.PS: Have you seen the Wind River web site lately? I have to admit it had been a while for me, and it’s very different from what used to be there. Check it out.

I detect a disconnect—display technology continues to evolve. Not necessarily at breakneck speed, but fast enough that you want to upgrade your technology every few (five?) years. But in the places like airports, bus and train terminals, etc., they don’t want to upgrade that frequently. So what’s a display supplier to do? That’s the question I posed to David King, the President of Litemax, a leader in industrial displays, in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

It takes a huge amount of compute power to perform AI. In the past, those calculations occurred in the Cloud, where the cluster of processors would reside. The push today is to move AI out to the Edge. But can we handle the processing that’s required for AI out on the Edge? That’s the question I posed to Ed Kuzemchak, the Chief Technology Officer at Software Design Solutions, an Applied Visions company, in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

A hardware revolution is underway, thanks to software! Is it really? It is according to Dipti Vachani, the Senior Vice President and General Manager of Arm’s Automotive and IoT Lines of Business in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast. Dipti does a great job explaining why this is the case and what the developer community needs to do about it. Check it out.

Should you fear the quantum security apocalypse? Do you even know it is and what it means and how it can occur? If you have any doubt, I suggest you listen to this week’s Embedded Executives podcast, where I spoke to Alan Grau, the Vice President of IoT and Embedded Solutions at Sectigo.

What is mission critical? It’s one of those, “ask five people and you’ll get five different answers” questions. For this exercise, I asked the question of Arun Subbarao, the Vice President of Engineering at Lynx Software Technologies, because it’s something he deals with on a daily basis. Upon his response, the next questions was, “How far are you willing to go to make your system meet that criteria?” But the real questions is, “How much are you willing to pay?” And that’s just the beginning of this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.