Embedded Computing Design

We often say that designing secure systems means thinking about security early on in the design process. That means really early on, well before any pen is put to paper, so to speak. 

To understand what that means, I spoke to Denis Noel, the Director of Strategy in the Secure Connected Edge business unit at NXP on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast. Denis walked through each of the various steps a developer should be taking.

Don’t stop me if you’ve heard this before, because it needs to be repeated, again, and again. The embedded industry needs to take security more seriously. Hacks are continuing to occur and will continue until there is a “security by design” mentality in place in our space. It’s hard to believe we are still having this discussion, but we are. 

I also expressed my frustration on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast with Josh Heller, the Manager of Product Security at Digi International. Josh confirmed my fears, but had some great suggestions to help solve the problem.

Edge AI is one of the popular topics amongst the embedded community. It’s the place where decisions are made, data is analyzed, etc. It’s also a place where lots of confusion arises because of its complexity, especially from a development perspective. To get to the heart of where the challenges lie in this phase of design, I spoke with Jim Beneke, a Vice President for Tria Americas, an Avnet company, on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast. Jim has a pretty deep history in the embedded space and served as a great resource on this topic.

Common knowledge says that if you want to create an ASIC, you’d better have at least $1M in your bank account. The folks at Efabless say that my common knowledge is inaccurate by a long shot. They claim to be able to get folks started for far less than $100k.

I needed to understand how this is possible, so I invited Michael Wishart, the CEO and co-founder of Efabless, to explain how it works on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast, with Kumar Gala and Maureen Helm, both Distinguished Engineers with Analog Devices.

Theoretically, you can do whatever functions you require in hardware or software. The most efficient way to complete those functions is with the proper mix of hardware and software. The important question is how you determine what gets implemented in hardware versus what’s in software. 

What if you can do a quasi-hardware-software mix? That’s what is available through embedded FPGAs. 

To understand this technology far better than Vin or I can, we invited Steve Mensor, a Vice President at Achronix Semiconductor onto the DevTalk with Rich and Vin podcast to explain it in terms that we could understand.

From a developer’s perspective, Edge AI is anything but simple. Any tools, software, etc., that can simplify the process of integrating this technology into a system is very welcome. 

That’s where ClearBlade comes in, with its framework that developers “design to,” using hardware, software, and even terminology that the design community is accustomed to. That process may seem vague and complex, but it needn’t be, as stated by Aaron Allsbrook, the Co-Founder and CTO of ClearBlade, in this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

Industrial platforms come with a specific set of design criteria. And the term “industrial” can be quite ambiguous, running the gamut from power tools to manufacturing equipment. 

Obviously, there are different requirements within this range. 

When you’re choosing an MCU for this space, you had better understand what your specific requirements are. Making the wrong choice will likely have an impact on the efficiency of your end product, which could result in higher power consumption, less heat, and so on. To understand where a designer should start the MCU selection process, I spoke to Steve Tateosian, the Senior Vice President of Consumer, IoT, and Industrial MCUs at Infineon, on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

At the LoRa Alliance, there’s a new sheriff in town. Alper Yegin is the group’s new CEO.

LoRaWAN, which stands for long range wide-area network, allows transmissions to occur at very low power, sometimes lasting many years without changing batteries.

Yegin believes the LoRaWAN spec is quite solid, but there’s always room for it to evolve. He feels that one of his primary tasks is increasing awareness and education around the standard. This can (and will) happen by increasing partnerships with complementary organizations, having more activity at industry events, and holding local meetups.

In this week’s Embedded Executives podcast, we also discuss how the spec competes in a crowded space and what the future holds.

A few weeks ago, at CES, I encountered a technology that seemed too science fiction to actually work. In its simplest form, you wear a headband that contains a few sensors, and those sensors read your brain waves. That’s not really possible, or is it? Being the skeptic that I am, I told the spokespeople that I doubted their technology could work, and I moved on.

Open tools are becoming the norm in the embedded software development space. And that’s definitely the case for Analog Devices’ CodeFusion Studio tool.

The IDE lets developers start with an SoC, and design their systems from there. The software development platform is based on Microsoft's Visual Studio Code (VS Code).

On this week’s Embedded Executives podcast, with Kumar Gala and Maureen Helm, both Distinguished Engineers with Analog Devices’ Software & Digital Platforms Group, we defined what “open” means in this space, then jumped into how and where a developer would get started.

It’s been a very successful year for the Z-Wave Alliance. If you have any doubts about that statement, check out this week’s Embedded Executives podcast, where I spoke to Avi Rosenthal, the Chairman of the Alliance. 

Avi rattled off a long list of achievements for the organization, including a new spec, an unplug fest, and many new products. These endeavors all transcend nicely into wins for the community. That means developers have more/better options when it comes to wireless devices.

Tyson Tuttle left the helm of Silicon Labs a few years ago, took a little time to recharge the batteries, and now he’s back in the thick of things with a new company called Circuit.

Given its name, you might think it’s a company designing ICs, but that’s not true.

The company is building what some might call a productivity tool, but Tyson describes it as something way bigger and far more involved than that. He claims it’s a way to turn information into insights to simplify life, enhance work, and strengthen communities.

Hear all about it on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

The industry revolves around two types of AI, namely research AI versus production AI. I wasn’t sure what these terms meant and their differences, so I asked an expert to join me on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

John Weil is the Vice president and General Manager of Synaptics’ IoT Business Unit. After setting me straight, John talks about the last 20% of a design that the customer needs to figure out for themselves, amongst other things.

What is the real definition of a software-defined vehicle (SDV)? It depends, mostly on who you are asking that question of.

I asked John Heinlein, the Chief Marketing Officer at Sonatus and he had a great response on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

We discussed the differences between various tiers of vehicles, how they are upgraded, and what we should be looking out for as we move forward.

Note that John has his podcast and was gracious enough to have me on as a guest recently. Hear that one here.

Is documentation an issue for your embedded project? Wouldn’t it be great if you didn’t have to create that documentation yourself, yet have it be as good (or better) than you could do yourself?

That’s what the tool from Driver does. In full disclosure, I didn’t understand how the company’s technology worked, so I had a great discussion with Driver’s CEO and Co-Founder, Adam Tilton on this this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

The amount of NAND memory that exists today is staggering. There are many different kinds of NAND, and the needed type is based on the intended application. Sometimes you need high-speed memory, sometimes very dense memory, and sometimes you need the memory to go into an environment that’s less than favorable.
 

Wireless power transfer is one of the cooler applications I’ve come across recently. It’s getting a lot of attention lately, because its potential is huge, in a fairly broad spectrum of applications. When I saw that Eggtronic had a development kit that would allow me to play around with the technology, I jumped on it. The promise of highly efficient wireless power transfer is quite exciting.

With all the focus on AI and machine learning these days, we sometimes take other facets of design for granted, some of which are vital, like the wireless component.
 

I spent three days at electronica in Munich last month and saw some amazing technologies and products, in addition to meeting some old friends, and (hopefully) making some new ones. Rumor has it that there were about 80,000 attendees and almost 3,500 exhibitors, spread out over 18 halls. Oh, and it was cold, very cold.

We are being bombarded with data; it’s coming at us from so many avenues, particularly as we move into the world of AI and the analytics that it brings.

The key to a proper edge-to-cloud strategy is being able to make sense of that plethora of data. That statement sounds obvious and simple, but it’s quite the opposite. If you don’t have the proper strategy in place, your design could be doomed before it even gets started.

To understand where to begin, and what path to take with the data strategy, I spoke to Johannes Biermann, the President and COO of aicas, who gives some guidelines for developers, on this this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.