Embedded Executive Podcast

SECO USA does not produce ventilators. However, its customers do. As a result, SECO USA forged a partnership to produce, manufacture, and donate those ventilators to needy hospitals in the US. It’s great to see things like this, when so many people are in need during the COVID-19 pandemic. As Greg Nicoloso, the CEO of SECO USA explained, the company doesn’t want to be a medical-device supplier, but they do want to be a supplier to the companies that supply medical devices. Greg does a great job of explaining all of this on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

The Wi-SUN Alliance has been around for nearly a decade. The group was formed to develop testing and certification standards for connecting to IoT networks. It has its own wireless spec, which may or may not be confusing, depending on who you are and who you’re talking to. To eliminate the confusion for me and our readers, I interviewed Phil Beecher, President of the Wi-SUN Alliance in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast. Thankfully, he set me straight.

The goal of the Embedded Executives podcast is to educate our readers about the issues that are of concern to a design engineer/developer. One executive that’s seen just about every situation a developer might encounter is Rory Dear, the Managing Director of DSL. As such, I ran through a litany of issues with Rory, getting his opinion on everything from NRE to open source.

5G requires more radios. Playing devil’s advocate, does that mean there are many more points of failure? Seems obvious, doesn’t it? That’s what I asked Piyush Sevalia, an Executive Vice President at SiTime, who joined me for this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

Tracing of products is an important function. It can be used for everything from property loss to food and medicine whereabouts, and lots of stuff in between. Another interesting application for tracing, especially in our new normal, is knowing when people are practicing social distancing. Wiser Systems specializes in tracing, so I wondered whether its technology could be used to track people. That’s where the conversation started with Logan Maxwell, the company’s Director of Technical Sales in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

There is an explosion of data, thanks to COVID-19. I heard that recently, and it surprised me. I could not understand the relationship between the two, so I went to someone who has to deal with that huge increase, Virtium. My guest on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast is Jacques Issa, a Senior Vice President at the company. And once he explained it to me, it was somewhat of a “Duh!” moment.

Different vendors are doing different things to cope with the COVID-19 pandemic. Many of them are doing their part to help get us through this awful time. One of those is SiFive, a fabless semiconductor company specializing in the RISC-V instruction set architecture. Hear what they are doing to help society in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

The LoRa Alliance is a fairly dynamic organization, as projects appear to be progressing nicely. The organization began with just a handful of vendors and has now grown to more than 500. To that end, Dave Kjendal, CTO and Executive Vice President of Engineering at Senet, has just joined the Alliance’s Board of Directors. It seemed like a good time to speak to Dave to hear what his ideas and direction are for the Alliance. Dave is my guest on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

If you’ve been in the industry for a while, you likely know that we continually oscillate between more compute power at the edge and a more centralized computer. Is there a valid reason for that? That’s the question I asked of Kristin Russell, President of Global Services at Arrow Electronics in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

Many pundits say that the key to neutralizing the COVID-19 virus is testing, lots of testing. That’s easier said than done, unless you believe what the technology experts at SensiML are saying. They claim that with enough data in hand, they can tell you whether you have the infection simply by coughing into a microphone. And the test should produce results that are about 90% accurate. Wow! To be clear, this does not meet the requirements of a clinical tool, but it’s a fantastic start.When I heard about this, I knew I had to hear more, so I dialed up SensiML’s CEO, Chris Rogers, who explained exactly how it works in our Special Edition of the Embedded Executive podcasts.