Embedded Computing Design

You likely have heard of the Rust programming language, known for its safety features. But, like me, you may not know its details, and frankly, why you should be considering it for your next design. For those reasons, Rich and Vin invited Jonathan Pallant, a Senior Engineer with Ferrous Systems, to join them on this episode of DevTalk with Rich and Vin.

Just about everybody in the engineering space has reverse-engineered a product at some point. It might have been for professional reasons, like seeing how a competitor is attacking a problem or simply seeing how they engineered a product. Or it could have been for personal reasons, because the product stopped working, or simply because they wanted to. 

Note: If you search for “Tear Down” on Embedded Computing Design, you can see the products we’ve reverse-engineered.

Then there are those people, like the folks at emproof, who get paid to reverse-engineer products, particularly on the software side. Tim Blazytko, the company’s Chief Scientist, Head of Engineering, and Co-Founder, joined us on this episode of DevTalk with Rich and Vin to share some of his experiences with reverse engineering.

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.

Most people in our embedded industry are familiar with Steve Sanghi, who has been the CEO of Microchip for more than thirty years. Steve took over the company in its not-so-successful early days and brought it to the great heights we know today, as a multi-billion dollar semiconductor powerhouse.

Steve stepped down from the CEO role a few years ago and is now doing lots of philanthropic work and writing a few books. We were thrilled and honored to have Steve join us on the latest episode of DevTalk with Rich and Vin.

Maher Matta, the President of the Americas division of Infineon Technologies agreed to join Rich and Vin on this podcast episode. The audience will likely relate to the route taken by Maher, as he came up through the engineering ranks, starting as a bench engineer. As you might expect, there were some bumps and bruises along the way. If you subscribe to the theory that the proof is in the pudding, the evidence is clear—the reign under Maher is working. The company is thriving and is a leader in many of the spaces in which it competes. Hear what Maher had to say about his rise through the ranks.

The space program has come quite far in the last decade when it comes to sending people to Mars and building a colony there. If you’re wondering what it would take to accomplish that, check out the book Colonizing Mars by Frank Norris. Or, take the easy way out and check out the latest DevTalk with Rich and Vin podcast, where we invited Frank on as a guest.

As the complexity of our embedded systems has exploded, particularly in the automotive space, a requirements-management tool has moved into the “must-have” category.

Engineers know how important it is to test their prototypes. What they don’t seem to get is that the testing process needs to start at the beginning of the design process, not at the end. And testing must continue all the way through the entire design process. The reasons for this are what Rich and Vin go through on this episode of DevTalk with Rich and Vin.

In this episode of DevTalk with Rich (Nass) and Vin (D’Agostino), Matt Johnson, the CEO of Silicon Labs joins us. It’s a lively discussion, starting in rural Maine, and ending with “Should engineers be concerned that AI will take their jobs?” Listen in for some interesting responses.

Welcome to a slightly different version of our DevTalk with Rich and Vin podcast. In addition to doing our traditional tech talks, which you’ve clearly told us that you enjoy, we will be producing discussions with CEOs. But we won’t be going through the usual company blah, blah, blah. We’re going to dig a little deeper and find out what really drives these individuals, who are obviously very determined, or they wouldn’t be in the positions they are in. And we told them that to be a guest, they couldn’t limit or filter our questions in any way; anything and everything is on the table. 

To get us started, we spent some time with Ron Konezny, the CEO of Digi International.

Chiplets are quite in vogue these days. But are they the solution to all your problems? Probably not, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t understand what they are, how they work, and how you can implement them in your design. Check out this installment of DevTalk with Rich and Vin and you’ll at least have a baseline understanding of this technology.

This is the time of year for predictions: What do you think will happen in 2024? 
 

In the golden era of electrical engineering, when yours truly was a budding designer, we worked with a processor, like an 8051 or an 8085, and we wrote some code to go with it. Programmable log? It existed, but those things were too darn expensive for what we called mainstream or mid-range applications. 

Fast forward to today, and you’d be hard pressed to come up with application that doesn’t make use of programmable logic.

In this episode of DevTalk with Rich and Vin, we look at today’s landscape of FPGAs, particularly those that are, in theory, aimed at the mid-range of the market. And we bring in a special guest, Gordon Hands, a Senior Director with Lattice Semiconductor.

When content gets posted to Embedded Computing Design that’s latest “The Basics of …” or “XYZ 101,” the content usually gets tons of page views. I always wondered why that was the case. Are our engineers not as knowledgeable as we think? Are they just checking to make sure their assumptions are correct? I decided this would be a good topic for Vin, who teaches classes in some of these basics. Check out this edition of DevTalk with Rich and Vin to see the response.

Are you wondering what would be considered a practical application for AI at the endpoint (the place where the data is captured)? Well, you’re in luck, because Rich is moderating a panel at Renesas’ AI Live virtual conference that specifically covers that topic. 
 

Seemingly, if you've read any news report that touches on the technology sector, there’s some mention of artificial intelligence. But too often, we hear people talking about AI as an application, and that’s wrong, just like the IoT is not an application.

AI seems to be omni-present. It’s in the news, it’s in our classrooms, and it’s certainly in our engineering labs. But are we spending too much time discussing the technology that’s the current “new thing,” or is it really the greatest technology of our lifetime?

While Rich and Vin usually believe they all the answers to all the design-related questions, that may not always be the case. For example, when the question of where to begin your AI-based design came up, the “experts” felt in was prudent to bring in someone even more expert. In this case, that was Stuart Feffer, of Renesas.

Fill a room with university professors and industry people, and the conversation quickly finds its way to ?Why can?t academia better prepare their students for industry??