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We are now about a year into the official launch of PICMG’s COM-HPC standard. The spec launched with a lot of fanfare from the association, many of its members, and from Embedded Computing Design. To see what’s happened over the past year, I invited Christian Eder to join my weekly Embedded Executives podcast. Christian plays a key role within PICMG, serving as Chairman of the COM-HPC working group. Christian is also the Director of Marketing for congatec.

Infineon is undergoing a fairly significant change, in my eyes at least. Whether it’s an intentional move or just one that’s happening through an unintended culture change, there’s no doubt that it is happening. What I mean by this is that, again in my opinion, the company is changing from one with a German culture to one with a Silicon Valley culture. It’s possible (and likely) that the acquisition of Cypress Semi had a lot to do with that. Is this culture shift a good thing? In my opinion, it is. Is it real? To get the answer to that, I interviewed Shawn Slusser, an Infineon Senior Vice President in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

John Deere is pushing the envelope in the farming space. The company is on the leading edge with technologies like autonomous tractors. From my limited knowledge of the farming industry, that seems like it’s beyond what farmers are asking for. But I’ve clearly been misinformed, as the farmers are way ahead of what I realized, partly thanks to innovations from the likes of John Deere. Hear what they are providing in my interview with Joe Liefer, a Senior Product Manager for Autonomy for John Deere’s Intelligent Solutions Group (ISG) in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

WiFi is on the move again. WiFi 6 is becoming more entrenched, but WiFi 7 is just around the corner. Are these new iterations really necessary, or is it just a way to get users to upgrade to the latest and greatest? To that end, I invited Cees Links, the General Manager of Qorvo’s Wireless Business Division to join me for this week’s Embedded Executives podcast. In this episode, Cees runs through all the advantages and tradeoffs associated with each new flavor of WiFi , so designers and consumers can make an educated decision to plan their futures.

Sub-threshold technology has pushed microprocessor power levels down to places we have not seen before.  While it’s not a new technology, but something that Ambiq has been implementing for many years, why haven’t other vendors implemented it, if it’s so promising? That’s the question I started with in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast with my guest,  Ambiq’s Vice President of AI, Carlos Morales.

The discussion of SoC versus ASSP has been going on for as long as these devices have existed. The pendulum seems to shift over time, depending on which applications are hot at the moment (is there currently a killer app?), how much the manufacturing costs are, and a host of other factors. To understand where the discussion sits today, I spoke to Rajinder Cheema, the Senior Vice President of Engineering at Socionext America in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

We’ve been talking a lot lately about what it means to be “real time.” In theory, it’s not something that’s achievable. But in practice, “good enough” is good enough for many applications. Another product to hit the market recently is a real-time database, developed by McObject. When I saw that release, I jumped at the chance to speak to Steve Graves, McObject’s President and CEO, to see if his definition matched mine. Check out this week’s Embedded Executives podcast to hear Steve’s thoughts.

Newark recently conducted a poll of Makers and Professional Makers, looking at their board choices, operating environments, architectures, and so on. The results from the study were pretty eye-opening. Hence why I had a discussion with Cliff Ortmeyer, Newark’s Global Head of Technology Product Marketing and Solutions Development. We talked about results of the poll, why the respondents chose to respond they way they did, and whether developers were making choices for the right reasons. Check out our discussion in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

The Connectivity Standards Alliance (CSA) continues to be a force to be reckoned with within our embedded space. And I mean that in a good way. Today, we are discussing the security of consumer devices, which falls under the Matter portion of the CSA. That security design is now complete and the open-source implementation is near-ready.According to Steve Hanna, a Distinguished Engineer at Infineon Technologies, Matter will be raising the security bar to where it needs to be. Obviously, security is a moving target, and the group will continue to evolve the standard.Our second guest, Chris LaPre, Director of Technology for the CSA, speaks from the Alliance’s perspective on what needs to happen to get a large number of influential contributors to agree on a standard that continually keeps the end user in mind. Hear all that and more in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

AI should be performed at the Edge whenever possible, according to Yasser Khan,  CEO and Co-Founder of MicroAI. But there seems to be just as many reasons to do it in the Cloud. This is where the back-and-forth began in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

There are many applications that require real-time interactions. Automotive certainly fits into that category. But the term “real time” is bothersome to me, as it’s not something that’s achievable. We can get “near real time,” but that’s about as good as it gets. But is that good enough? That’s the question I asked Heather Gorr,  Senior Product Marketing Manager for the MATLAB product at Mathworks, in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

EVs can be confusing from a “what voltage does it run at” perspective. We have the 12-V lead-acid batteries that have been around for decades. But there are many new sizes, types, chemistries, and voltages. According to Patrick Kowalyk, a North American Automotive Principal Field Applications Engineer for Vicor, the way in which we deliver power within the automobile needs to change. To hear exactly how, tune in to this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

When designing your embedded system, the storage subsystem is not always at the top of the priority list. Depending on your system, that may be okay. But if you’re designing for automotive applications, that’s one way to get yourself in hot water. In this week’s Embedded Executives podcast, I talked to Robert Bielby, Micron’s Senior Director of Automotive System Architecture, to understand why the memory subsystem needs to move up the list, potentially way up.

We say it all the time: you are going to get hacked! The most important factor at this point is to minimize the damage when the inevitable occurs. If cybersecurity is not one of your top design priorities, you need to adjust your list. That said, this week’s Embedded Executives podcast guest is Alan Grau, the Vice President of Business Development for PQShield. Alan explains the pretty simple terms of what happens when an attack occurs and why it may be happening. Note that Alan is also a speaker at this year’s IoT Device Security Conference, talking place on Nov. 9 (and available any time after that). Lots of good talks, all looking at different aspects of IoT Device security, including the automotive, and industrial and consumer applications.

The IIC, formerly known as the Industrial Internet Consortium, has a new name. They’re still the IIC, but now the acronym stands for Industry IoT Consortium. You may be surprised why they made the change; I know that I was.  IIC’s Chief Technology Officer, Stephan Mellor, has the answer in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

Low-end AI might be an oxymoron, because it’s hard to associate anything to do with AI as being low-end. But with AI evolving so rapidly, there really can be a case made for lower-end AI with machine vision. To understand what that means, what products fit that category, and most importantly, how it effects today’s embedded developers, check out this week’s Embedded Executives podcast with Donato Montanari, the Vice President and General Manager of Machine Vision at Zebra Technologies.

ISI, or Interconnect Systems International, was acquired by Molex in the recent past. The company is in the manufacturing space, particularly in terms of packaging, at both the chip and board levels. That puts the company in an interesting position when it comes to the chip shortage, as the company’s engineers have the ability to help customers redesign the boards to accommodate for different parts to replace those that simply are not available. To that end, I spoke with Tom Casey, a Vice president at ISI to hear how that’s working out. Check out this week’s Embedded Executives podcast to hear Tom’s thoughts.

If you could operate WiFi at the power levels typically associated with Bluetooth, do you really need Bluetooth anymore? I would think not, because WiFi offers so much more functionality, particularly the longer range. However, as this is usually the case, the answer is, “not so fast.” I asked that question (and many more) of Rob McCormick, a Director at InnoPhase, a company that specializes in low-power WiFi. He set me straight—for now. Check out this week’s Embedded Executives podcast to hear why.

Testing for physical interfaces, especially in the automotive space, can be quite challenging. It’s a harsh environment for starters, but there are other issues to contend with as well. I went through those issues, and how to deal with them with Mike Schnecker, a Business Development Manager for Rohde & Schwarz in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

In theory, developers should be writing their code well before the hardware is available. In practice, that’s not usually the case, for a host of reasons. CacheQ Systems has come up with a method that greatly simplifies this process, and really does allow developers to get down to business without the ready hardware. How do they do that? That’s what you’ll learn in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast with Clay Johnson, CacheQ Systems’ CEO) and Co-Founder.