Moore's Lobby: Where engineers talk all about circuits

2021 brought us the first functioning 2 nm chip, a milestone accomplished by a team at IBM Research, one of the foremost research institutions on the planet for the electronics industry. In the upper echelons of this prestigious group is Dr. Jeffrey Welser, the Vice President of Exploratory Science and University Partnerships for IBM. In this episode of Moore's Lobby, Dr. Welser talks with Daniel about everything from quantum computing to CMOS devices to neural networks.

Two engineering students developed an autonomous golf cart system to transport people across campus. One accelerator program and a lot of engineering later, the same two engineers founded Embark, an autonomous trucking company that rapidly grew into a $5 billion endeavor.  In 2018, when the company was only two years old, Embark claimed an industry-first: a 2,400-mile coast-to-coast journey for an autonomous truck from LA to Jacksonville, Florida. For the first time in many people's minds, autonomous trucking seemed to have arrived. This is the story of Brandon Moak and Alex Rodrigues, CTO and CEO respectively of Embark. Moak joins us in the Lobby to talk about the challenges of scalable autonomous systems, gaining acceptance in the transportation industry, and the differences between passenger autonomous vehicles and those meant for the infrastructure of shipping.

What do Lady Gaga, DreamWorks, and SpaceX have in common? Would you believe us if we said the answer was tech? In this episode, two top HP execs talk about the unexpected ways this giant in the industry has gone from the inventors of the inkjet printer to Oscar-winning staple in Hollywood, healthcare, and some out-of-this-world applications. Joining Daniel in the Lobby today are Jim Nottingham, Global Head & General Manager of HP’s Advanced Compute & Solutions, and Bruce Blaho, HP Fellow and Chief Technologist for the Advanced Compute & Solutions Business Unit in HP Personal Systems. Daniel guides Jim and Bruce through a conversation about HP's monolithic presence in the history of the electronics industry and how precision engineering has revolutionized display technology just in time for the age of remote work. This trio of engineers delves into color fidelity across displays, data capture and storage, AI and machine learning, high-performance and edge compute, and the new wave of AR/VR. Highlights you won't want to miss: What are HP's plans for an EGOT? (No, seriously.) What does "the HP way" mean nowadays? How does DreamWorks keep Shrek's signature green the same from one display to another? How do you get unneeded workstation equipment off the ISS?  What's next after keyboards and mouses? 

In their conversation, Victor, Michael, and Daniel will discuss what it's like to walk in space, the technologies that are propelling space exploration, and the importance of engineers in making aerospace history.

Arduino recently announced a monumental change in its new efforts towards producing affordable, scalable hardware for industrial automation applications. Hear the how and why of Arduino's jump from the hobbyist bench to the factory floor.

The advent of AI is forcing us to rethink the way we design hardware and changing the way we think of processing. After all, data-hungry applications are processor-hungry applications.  In this episode of Moore’s Lobby, Daniel speaks with Michael Kagan, the CTO of NVIDIA, a tech giant and household name in processing. Kagan’s career spans foundational work across Intel, Mellanox, and now NVIDIA as they forge new technologies to enable accelerated compute. Learn about the three core pillars of data center computing (spoilers: “GPU” might not mean what you think it means anymore). And learn why compute will soon need to become service-based as the burden of processing shifts increasingly to supercomputers. And, of course, hear the historic reasons Kagan asserts that “chips without software is just expensive sand.” You won’t find a more qualified voice on the intersection between processing, compute-hungry applications, and data centers, so don’t miss this episode.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. How do you get hardware engineers to attend a seminar about security? Tell them it's a free buffet and then lock the doors behind them before you start the slide deck. To put it mildly, security is not hardware designers' favorite topic. But with millions of unsecured devices in the market, it's quickly becoming an issue the industry can't ignore.  Join our new host for Season 3, Daniel Bogdanoff, for this episode of Moore's Lobby that kicks off Season 3 with DARPA Program Manager at the Microsystems Technology Office (MTO), Serge Leef. Leef's storied background in design automation gives him a unique perspective on his current work as someone who helps select promising projects in the competitive world of DARPA funding. Tune in to get a clear breakdown of the security issues facing hardware devices, including a look at the types of attacks DARPA has on its radar. You'll hear about the similarities and differences of securing missile control systems compared to smart toilets. And, perhaps most importantly, you'll be faced with the very real question of whether hardware security is something we should entrust to design engineers at all. Along the way, you'll get answers to burning questions you never knew you had, like: How is a DARPA program manager like a movie producer? How is IC-level hardware design like fluoride? And How is designing for security like selling vitamins?  

Season 3 of Moore's Lobby serves up conversations with some of the most fascinating luminaries in the electronics industry.  Join host Daniel Bogdanoff as he geeks out with CTOs, inventors, astronauts, and more about the technologies that are changing the world.

Google is one of the most prominent corporations in history. Since its founding in 1998, it's gone from a scrappy startup in Silicon Valley to the portal through which most people access the internet.  How do you even begin to design compute infrastructure that massive? This week on Moore's Lobby, Dave talks with TWO Google Senior VPs of Engineering, Google Fellows Luiz Barroso and Amin Vahdat.  In this conversation, you'll hear about the early days of Google, back when their data centers were barely more than broom closets and the team was "unencumbered by expertise" in data center design. You'll hear about the off-the-wall iterations of their early data center ideas (like that time Google put their data centers into shipping containers, which is way more reasonable than it may sound at first). You'll hear about the incredible promise of the applications Google's tackling today—and the costs that come with that world-changing power. On the way, you'll learn more about two electrical engineers who came from very different backgrounds, pursued different specialties in academia, and yet ended up working together on some of the most extraordinary challenges facing compute in the modern era.  This episode will illuminate the past and future of Google from the engineering side and how “healthy hubris” leads to "a healthy disregard for the impossible.”   Meet Luiz Barroso and Amin Vahdat Luiz Barroso Luiz André Barroso is a Google Fellow leading the office of Cross-Google Engineering (XGE) from where he coordinates key technical initiatives that span multiple Google products. Over his two decades at Google he has worked as a VP of Engineering in the Core and Maps teams, and was a technical leader in areas such as Google Search and the design of Google’s computing platform. Luiz has published several technical papers and has co-authored “The Datacenter as a Computer”, the first textbook to describe the architecture of warehouse-scale computing systems, now in its 3rd edition. Luiz is a Fellow of the ACM and the AAAS, and holds B.S. and M.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the Pontifícia Universidade Católica of Rio de Janeiro and a Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from the University of Southern California. Recently he was awarded the 2020 Eckert-Mauchly Award.   Amin Vahdat Amin Vahdat is a Google Fellow and Technical Lead for networking at Google. He has contributed to Google’s data center, wide area, edge/CDN, and cloud networking infrastructure, with a particular focus on driving vertical integration across large-scale compute, networking, and storage. In the past, he was the SAIC Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at UC San Diego and the Director of UCSD’s Center for Networked Systems. Vahdat received his PhD from UC Berkeley in Computer Science, is an ACM Fellow and a past recipient of the NSF CAREER award, the Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, and the Duke University David and Janet Vaughn Teaching Award.

Microchip Technology is so recognizable in the semiconductor industry that it's hard to contemplate that it struggled rather a lot in its early years. From its split from General Instrument to its rocky beginnings as a company teetering on the edge of bankruptcy and on through its remarkable 121 consecutive profitable quarters, Microchip has fought for every inch of success it's achieved. In the middle of it all has been Steve Sanghi, CEO from 1990 until 2021, when he took on the role of Executive Chair. Steve has been an active driver in the industry, taking a "different-by-design"—or even straight-up risky—perspective in his approach to technology and leadership. In this episode of Moore's Lobby, Dave guides us through highlights of Steve's storied history of guiding Microchip into the modern era. Hear stories that paint a clear, oftentimes surprising portrait of the industry.