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.

In our Special Edition of the Embedded Executive podcasts, we are interviewing execs to see how they are dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic, only from an engineering workforce perspective (we’ll leave the politics to others). This edition is with a CEO who is smack in the middle of the US’s worst hotspot, New York City. Sendyne CEO John Milios describes what it’s like handling his engineering team.

The COVID-19 pandemic obviously hits different people in different ways, depending on a host of factors, which have all been discussed at length (and then some and then some) by the mainstream media. Here at Embedded Computing Design, we’re trying to understand how it has affected the engineering community solely from a work perspective. To that end, we will be conducting interviews with our Embedded Executives to see how they and their design teams are coping with the “new normal.” Today, I spoke with Todd DeBonis, President and CEO of Pixelworks. Like just about everyone I plan to speak to, his issues are both unique and similar.

The Internet of Secure Things Alliance (IoXT) is pushing a common (and obvious) goal for our industry. They want to keep all of our connected devices secure. How do they do that, who belongs to the Alliance, and what does the future hold? These are the questions I asked of David Kleidermacher in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast. David sits on the Alliance’s Board, and is also the Vice President of Engineering and Head of Android Security and Privacy at Google.

We are in the midst of a global pandemic thanks to COVID-19, aka Coronavirus. It’s turned people’s lives completely upside down. But engineers and developers, like many people, still have jobs to do. How that gets done in this time of social distancing is interesting at best. I discussed this issue with Rob Oshana, Vice President of Software R&D for Edge Processing, NXP in this week’s Special Edition of the Embedded Executives podcast.