Bluetooth is everywhere, right?

Until recently, I would have said “Almost everywhere,” since it hadn’t yet affected the industrial sector. However, according to Simon Ford, the Founder of Blecon, Bluetooth has now entered that final frontier. It’s done so for obvious reasons, like power, performance, and ubiquity, and a few other reasons.

Hear what Simon has to say on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

Bluetooth claims to own the low-power wireless space with its Low Energy (LE) flavor. A newer, yet older entrant in the space wants to claim that throne. That would be Low Energy UWB, or LE-UWB. And now you understand the reference to newer-older.

UWB has been around for many years, but the LE variant is relatively new. In addition to lower power, it also offers a much higher bandwidth than Bluetooth, amongst other benefits, all of which are detailed by Frederic Nabki, the Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer of SPARK Microsystems. Frederic joined me on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

There are many different ways to look at the tangled web of AI. For example, tackling from the inference perspective is one way of looking at the puzzle, as not everyone is doing that.

One vendor, who may have a leg up, is VSORA, who claims to "make AI more accessible, efficient, and sustainable than ever.” That sounds like a tall order, but a great move to reaching that goal is to bring along someone who’s actually climbed the mountain before. In this case, that would be Sandra Rivera, a long-time Intel veteran and recent CEO of Altera, and now the Chairwoman of the Board at VSORA. Sandra was my guest on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast.

The Chips and Science Act has been with us for a while now, and obviously, technology doesn’t stand still.

To understand what’s going on with this important act, I spoke to Reza Azarderakhsh, the Founder and CEO of PQSecure Technologies. Reza introduced this act to our audience about a year ago, so this serves as a great update. We also dive into the related security issues developers need to stay on top of.

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

Kinetic energy can be harvested from very simple mechanical movements, like the push of a button or the turning of a knob. WePower Technologies has been able to do more with that small amount of power than I expected.

For example, they can power a transceiver to turn a light on or off simply by pushing a button or power the mechanical mechanism in a door lock by turning a knob 90 degrees. This would replace a battery that needs to be swapped on a regular basis.

Hear more about it on the week’s Embedded Executives podcast, where I speak to WePower Technologies’ Founder and CEO, Larry Richenstein.

Avnet recently surveyed part of its core audience, and the topic was AI’s Impact on Engineering. It doesn’t get much closer to home than that.

To understand how the survey was conducted and, more importantly, what the results showed, I spoke to Alex Iuorio, Avnet’s Senior Vice President for Global Supplier Development.

Alex and I discussed the results, what they mean, and what the future looks like in terms of AI in engineering. Check out this week’s Embedded Executives podcast to hear what he had to say.

We’ve all seen the wireless charging devices; you set your phone down on the charger, come back after a while, and your phone is charged. If the charger manufacturer followed the standard set forth by the Wireless Power Consortium (WPC), that scenario would play out. If they didn’t follow the standard, then you may come back to an uncharged device.

Recently, the WPC released the latest version of its charging spec, pushing the charging level from 15 W up to 25 W. Hear more about it on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast, where I speak to the WPC’s Marketing Director, Paul Golden.

It’s time for an update on Wi-Fi. On this week’s Embedded Executives podcast, we take a look at what’s the latest, what’s coming, what’s real, and what’s not so real, all as it pertains to Wi-Fi.

To get answers to these questions, I spoke with Sivaram Trikutam, Senior Vice President of Wireless Products at Infineon Technologies. Sivaram and I went through the latest protocols to understand how things like range, power, frequency, and bandwidth will change (or not) going forward.

To that end, Infineon just launched its latest Wi-Wi-Fi transceiver, the AIROC ACW741x product family, which the company claims is the industry's first 20-MHz tri-radio device optimized for IoT applications.