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?

As you might expect, Rich and Vin take a different approach. They look at the things that were predicted for 2023, but didn’t actually pan out. Is AI the panacea that we expected? Maybe not. It’s likely that more partnerships must occur for this technology to match the hype. Tune in and let us know if you agree or disagree with our opinions.

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.

To get one more opinion on what is a practical application, Rich and Vin discuss exactly that, and as you’d expect, Vin dives in pretty deep. Check it out, and also check out the session at the virtual conference.

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. Rather, it’s an enabler to other applications. AI helps enhance your XYZ application, making it better, faster, etc. But that’s all it is, a means to an end. If you don’t believe me, check out this episode of DevTalk with Rich and Vin podcast.