Embedded Executive Podcast

Higher voltages and higher frequencies are becoming commonplace in embedded designs. That in itself doesn’t necessarily cause an issue. But when you add in that packages continue to shrink in size, you have the potential for detrimental heat and airflow issues. How do you deal with that? That’s where the discussion started with Dr. Phil Lessner, the Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, at KEMET. He had lots of advice for system designers in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

Cellular IoT is one way of connecting our devices. But is it the best way? I could make a really good argument why it’s not, and I actually tried to do that in my discussion with Dima Feldman, the Vice President of Product Management at Altair Semiconductor, now a Sony Group Company. In this week’s Embedded Executives podcast., Dima explained how it works and where it makes the most sense.

There are a lot of adjectives that you can use to describe a smart home: cool, useful, efficient, safe, etc. However, you also have to add “complex” to your list, because getting these smart devices to work and (gulp) interoperate, well that’s a different story. That’s where Connected Home over IP Alliance (CHIP) comes into play. In theory—and I’m told in practice as well—if any device is CHIP compliant, you simply plug it in and it works. If you look at the list of collaborators, you have to believe that this standard will stick. It includes Amazon, Apple, Google, and the Zigbee Alliance. To describe what the standard is and how it works, I spoke to Steve Hanna, a multi-hatted engineer. Steve is a Senior Principal at Infineon Technologies, Co-Chair of the Embedded Systems Work Group in the Trusted Computing Group (TCG), and he is my guest on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

Did you know there were standards established for wireless charging? In fact, they’re up to Rev. 2.0 of the standard. This was news to me. Stephen Rizzone, the President and Chief Executive Officer of Energous Corp. joined me to fill in the gaps, which in my case, were fairly wide. With the new spec, the distance the device can be from the charger is now measured in feet. Hear more in to this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

Yay! Another wireless standard. That’s just what we need, because the landscape isn’t already crowded enough. Do I sound cynical? Maybe. It depends on your perspective. WiFi HaLow is a WiFi-like standard that comes with its own set of benefits. I’ll let you decide whether there’s a place for another wireless standard after you listen to this week’s Embedded Executives podcast with Vahid Manian, Chief Operating Officer of Morse Micro.

The company formerly known as National Instruments is known simply as NI. Is that a big deal? Maybe, depending on who you ask. So I asked Carla Piñeyro Sublett, NI’s Chief Marketing Officer and General Manager of the company’s Portfolio Business. As expected, there’s far more to it than a simple name change. Tune in to this week’s Embedded Executives podcast to learn what it actually means.

We love our crystal balls, especially as we get into the later part of the year. I can make all the predictions I want, but my job doesn’t typically depend on whether my predictions are accurate. That’s not the case with product management folks, such as Ellen Boehm, who is the Senior Director of IoT Product Management for Keyfactor. Ellen has to determine what markets are going to be hot and why when it comes to IoT. I ask her to share of those details on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

I think it’s awesome when some of the bigger vendors in our space help fund start-ups. One example of that is Maxim Ventures, an arm of Maxim Integrated. The investment group is funding a bunch of startups in the medical space. You go into these things knowing that some of your investments are going to pay off and some aren’t. But if you pick a big-time winner, it can pay off in spades. Maxim Ventures has already seen some level of success, as Chris Neil, a Senior Vice President of Maxim Ventures, explains in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

Living at the Edge can be tricky. That’s the Edge of the IoT that I’m referring to. When you’re one of the leading providers of microprocessors, as NXP clearly is, you have lots of questions that must be addressed. Two big ones concern security and AI. In this week’s Embedded Executives podcast, I spoke to NXP’s Ron Martino, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Business Line Edge Processing, to see hear the company’s responses to those important questions.

RISC-V gets a lot of attention as an open-source ISA. Is that attention warranted? The answer, unfortunately, is that it depends. It depends on what problem you’re trying to solve, your familiarity with the tools, your design window, and your engineering talent. The aspect I wanted to confirm was whether the ecosystem is ready for prime time, because as you know, no matter how great your silicon is, if you can’t program it, you’re not going to get very far. One IC vendor that’s sticking his proverbial neck out in the RISC-V space is GigaDevice. The company is betting that the tools are ready and they’re better than “good enough.” That was opined by Reuben Townsend, a European FAE for GigaDevice in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.