Amelia's Weekly Fish Fry

The Sustainment Slog

“It is what it is till it ain’t” - Mac Miller, 2019

When does sustainment become a slog? When does the bottom one percent of your sales start becoming too much to bear? In this week’s Fish Fry, we are diving into the world of OEM product pruning with Ethan Plotkin and Siku Thompson from GDCA. Ethan, Siku and I discuss supply chain trust, integrated sustainment, and the hidden costs associated with ad hoc orders. Also this week, we take a closer look at some revolutionary new research from Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab that is creating drinking water from atmospheric humidity.

Super Standards to the Rescue!

In this week’s podcast, we are tackling two of the biggest themes at this year’s Embedded Tech Trends Conference:  SOSA (Sensor Open Systems Architecture) and artificial intelligence processing at the edge. First up, I take a closer look at SOSA with Rodger Hoskins from Pentek. Rodger and I discuss the role SOSA will have in the warfighting technology, what the future holds for this open systems architecture, and what exactly the “Grey Box Concept” is all about. Next up, Doug Patterson from AiTech and I discuss some real world examples of AI processing at the edge, the importance of situational awareness, and why surveillance and reconnaissance plays an important role across many different application areas. 

Infinite Compute Capacity

Design automation and verification take center stage in this week’s podcast! First up, Seena Shankar (Cadence Design Systems) joins me to discuss the power of cloud computing in EDA. Next, Vanessa Cooper (DVCon U.S. Technical Program Committee Chair) gives special sneak peek into this year’s Design and Verification Conference and Expo. Vanessa and I discuss the various workshops and tutorials offered at this year’s conference and why you should book your registration sooner than later.

New Kid on the Block

This week’s podcast is one part frog embryo, one part embedded design, and one part crystal ball! To start things off, we take a closer look at how a team of research scientists have created a new form of life (a living, programmable organism called a Xenobot) with a little help from African frog embryos, a algorithm that simulates designs for new life-forms, and the Deep Green supercomputer cluster at the Vermont Advanced Computing Core. Also this week, Dunstan Power (ByteSnap Design) and I discuss a variety of design trends for 2020, including the rise of RISC-V, the role of security in embedded design, and why he expects to see a big push into machine learning-driven by tools from Xilinx and Intel.

Thermal Trials and Temperature Tales

We all know that today’s engineering teams are facing increasing challenges surrounding thermal aware designs. Whether you are designing a board, an IC, or a system, we all struggle with thermal and electrical simulation at one point or another. In this week’s Fish Fry, Jerry Zhao (Cadence Design Systems) and I discuss the challenges of thermal and electrical simulation and the benefits of electrical and thermal co-simulation of multi-physics designs.

Hyperscale to the Rescue!

In this week’s podcast we take a closer look at how the increase of machine to machine data traffic has encouraged a movement toward spine leaf architecture and die-to-die connectivity in hyperscale data centers. Manmeet Walia (Synopsys) joins me this week to discuss the evolution of data center technology and how the challenges surrounding cache currency and network functionality is driving change in the world of hyper scale data centers.  Also this week, we check out a new Kickstarter campaign called Flash Forest that is looking to plant a billion trees by 2028 with a little help from a specialized fleet of drones! 

 

All of the Information: The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly

Did you know that over a hundred devices are connected to the internet every second? In this week’s episode of Fish Fry, we take a closer look at the challenges facing us as we develop the next generation of connected devices. Tom Doyle (CEO - Aspinity) joins me to discuss the details of Aspinity’s innovative RAMP (Reconfigurable Analog Modular Processor) platform, the "deal breakers" as he sees them when it comes to IoT designs, and why the answer to our always-on, always-sensing power challenges is architectural. Also this week, we check out Kickstarter’s Make 100 campaign and a new kind of high-performance multilayer piezo speaker from TDK called PiezoListen.  

 

Your RTOS or Mine?

Are you ready to RTOS? Because I am! In this episode of Fish Fry, Mike Skrtic (Perepio) and I discuss RTOS fundamentals, advanced RTOS Techniques, and how you can get a little help with your next RTOS debugging project. Also this week, we check out some cool (and creepy?) new artificial skin technology called “Skin-On” that could make skin-on-skin interactions with our gadgets a reality.

 

So Many Verification Cycles, So Little Time

Are you ready for an EDA smorgasbord? In this week’s episode of Fish Fry, we are laying out virtual buffet of emulation, hardware assisted development, enterprise prototyping, and parser platforms for your friday podcasting pleasure. First up, Frank Schirrmeister (Cadence Design Systems) joins us to dish about our growing thirst for verification, the benefits of FPGA based prototyping and why hardware-assisted development is more and more important these days. Also this week, Michiel Ligthart (President and COO - Verific) chat about the role of parsers in the EE community and why Verific chose a giraffe to be its mascot.

Driving Optimization

What do high level synthesis, FPGAs, and the first 3D printer capable of printing fully-functional electronics have in common? This week's podcast, of course! First up, I chat with Max Odendahl (CEO, Founder - Silexica) about ins and outs of system level understanding and optimization, what we can do with unsynthesizable C/C++ code and how we can tackle the biggest challenges in using Software  (C/C++) for hardware design. Also this week, we check out a new Kickstarter campaign called eForge that hopes to make 3D printed electronics an everyday reality.