Embedded Executive Podcast

Moore’s Law has been around for a long time—around 50 years. It says that transistor count will double every 18 months. Many “experts” have predicted that it is coming to an end. Some of those predictions have already proven false. But what’s the real answer: when will it end? That’s the basis of this week’s Embedded Executives podcast, where I speak to Thomas Smelker, the Vice President and General Manager of Custom Microelectronics Solutions at Mercury Systems.

It’s very clear that different parts of the country and the world are dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic in different ways. That’s mostly dictated by local governments and the severity of the pandemic in a given area. In this Special COVID-19 Edition of Embedded Executive, I spoke to someone who lives and works in eastern Pennsylvania, that being Bryan Muzyka, a Manager at Advanced Cooling Technologies (ACT). This is an area that is less affected than others, but nonetheless, the company is doing its part to keep its employees safe.

Device security is a key concern for everyone from developers to end-product suppliers to end users. Sometimes it takes some extreme measure to ensure the security of your device. Those extremes include quantum-safe cryptographic solutions, which is what is provided by PQ Secure, a relatively new company. In this week’s Embedded Executives podcast, I spoke to Reza Azarderakhsh, President of PQ Secure and he explained to me how this technology works and why it’s necessary in our current environment.

Security has stepped up in some areas. But that’s not good enough—it has to step up in all areas. That couldn’t be any more important than it is today as we try to get through this terrible period that’s dominated by COVID-19. In light of that, I asked Louis Parks, the CEO of Veridify Security what need to happen to really lock down our systems. Check out this week’s Embedded Executive podcast.

During this pandemic, most people are focused on the U.S., or more likely, their own specific region of the country. But pandemic by definition means something that’s global. I decided to check in with a different part of the world. In this Special COVID-19 Edition of Embedded Executive, I spoke to Stefan Skarin, the CEO of IAR Systems, who lives and works in Sweden.

Mergers and acquisitions are a way of life in the embedded, semiconductor, and electronics industries. The current pandemic has altered that trajectory somewhat, but not as much as you might expect. Business is going on and, thankfully, there’s no end in sight. Such concepts were the topics of discussion in this week’s Embedded Executive podcast, where I interviewed Syed Alam, who is the Managing Director of Strategy and Consulting at Accenture.

Different parts of the country and the world have been hit in different ways by the COVID-19 pandemic. In our Special Edition of the Embedded Executive podcasts, we are trying to understand how different groups are dealing with the issue, strictly from a work/engineering perspective. In this interview, I spoke with Thomas Fowler, Vice President of Central Engineering at Silicon Labs. Fowler is based in Austin, TX.

Open source is pretty close to “the norm” today. Aside from the military and a few other applications, developers don’t think twice about pulling down some open-source code and inserting it into their design. Is that a good thing? That’s the question I asked of Gurjot Singh, CEO of Lynx Software in this week’s Embedded Executive podcast.

We are still in the thick of the COVID-19 pandemic. Nobody knows that better than the folks in the Seattle area, one of the first hot spots in the U.S. Anthony Ambrose, President and CEO of Data I/O is based in Redmond, Wash., so he, along with the majority of his employees, have been dealing with issues like work-from-home for quite some time. While it’s far from ideal, the company has learned to operate in this manner. Check out this Special Edition Embedded Executives podcast to hear how they are doing that.

Decentralized power is a phenomenon that’s starting to hit the automotive sector. Is it better to have lower power levels in more places in the car, as opposed to one centralized place? Hmm, I’m not sure, as I think I can make a pretty argument for either solution. Rather than attempt a guess, I went right to an expert for this week’s Embedded Executives podcast. That expert is Patrick Wadden, Vicor's Global Vice President of Automotive Business Development. He explains which is the better approach and why.