Embedded Executive Podcast

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.

The AMPERE Project is a three-year initiative run out of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center. It’s being done by a combination of universities and industry. The goal is to ensure that embedded systems are being maximized, using the technology that’s typically employed by today’s supercomputers. To help our audience understand exactly what this is all about, and what they should know about it, I spoke to Eduardo Quinones, a senior researcher at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast. Eduardo is a key participant in the AMPERE Project.

In our Special Edition of the Embedded Executive podcasts, we are interviewing execs to see how their engineering teams are dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic. We are looking at companies in different parts of the world, and big companies and small companies. In this interview with Sasha Wolloch, President of Raltron Electronics, we get a peek at how it’s going in my home state of Florida.

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.