Embedded Executive Podcast

Is memory that’s aimed at a specific market really customized for that segment, or is it just marketing spiel? We have mobile memory, IoT memory, AI memory, and so on. Are they really different? That’s the question I posed to Huibert Verhoeven, the Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Automotive, Mobile and Emerging business segments at Western Digital in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

InnovationLab is giving new meaning to printed electronics. The company is literally printing electronics, not like a typical PCB. The current application is for sensors, like temperature sensors, but the potential is huge (and inexpensive). Check out my discussion with Florian Ullrich, Head of Business Development for InnovationLab this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

This week’s podcast guest, Johanna Pingel, a Product Manager at MathWorks, said that engineers should be concerned with the AI workflow. Do you agree? Do you even know what that means? I didn’t so I decided to go directly to the source and ask the question. Hear the answer on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

We’ve defined AIoT on multiple occasions; it’s where AI intersects with the IoT. And for our purposes, it typically involves the Industrial IoT, aka IIoT. To understand what this means to a system developer, and the impact that it’s had on their business, I chatted with Allan Yang, the Chief Technology Officer of Advantech in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast. We started by discussing whether hardware is now simply a commodity, or whether innovation really can occur on the hardware side when it comes to AIoT.

There’s been a shift in the security outlook, at least in my eyes. We’ve moved from “how do I keep from getting hacked” to “I’m going to get hacked, so I need to minimize the fallout.” To find out if I’m alone in this belief, I discussed the topic with Harry Haramis, the General Manager of PrimeKey in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast. Hear what Harry has to say.

Security is clearly in the spotlight these days, and for good reason—hacks continue on a regular basis. But the pendulum has shifted from “you need to make your system is hackproof” to “you need to minimize the damage when the inevitable hack occurs.” Is there truth to this statement? That’s the question I asked Stefan Skarin, CEO, IAR Systems, the company that also owns the Secure Thingz brand in this week’s Embedded Executives 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.