Moore's Lobby: Where engineers talk all about circuits

Latest Episodes:

Changing the World One Wireless RF Chip at a Time Jun 04, 2024

Show notes

After beginning his career with Hewlett-Packard, David Su met a friend for lunch to learn about a new startup called Atheros. He was so excited by the vision to develop world-changing products that Su "went for lunch and never left." At Atheros, Su had a "front-row seat" developing wireless WAN technology that transitioned from novelty to necessity while Atheros grew from a startup to a billion-dollar behemoth. That little startup was eventually acquired by another company you may have heard of: Qualcomm.

And what led Su to get involved with another startup? Well, lunch, of course. Su and his friends recognized that they could use their design experience to help fix a problem that was partially of their own making: battery consumption for wireless RF products. This was the genesis of Atmosic.

With his decades of design experience, Su admits that he stands on the shoulders of giants when creating new low-power products. The company has recently expanded its RF IC offerings from Bluetooth to Zigbee and Matter over Thread.

When asked how an IC design team knows when they have become either too structured or too unstructured, Su thoughtfully answered that if you never create anything innovative or your chips don't work, you have probably fallen into one of those two ditches.

You will want to join our host, Daniel Bogdanoff, as he discusses CMOS RF, energy harvesting, and the importance of teams with Su. They touch on many other interesting topics including:

-What he remembers most fondly from his days at Atheros.

-A development failure for one technology that led to success for another.

-The balance of circuits, system, and software design necessary to optimize product performance.

Can Silicon Photonics Solve the Bandwidth Bottleneck in AI Data Centers? May 21, 2024

Show notes

Steve Klinger, Vice President of Product, joins the Moore's Lobby podcast to discuss how LightMatter is using silicon photonics to improve speed and reduce power consumption in AI data centers. With two previous $1B+ startups under his belt, Klinger knows a thing or two about identifying successful technology solutions to current industry challenges. While compute performance continues to grow rapidly, interconnect has not been able to keep pace. In this episode, Klinger explains how LightMatter's flagship product, Passage, creates a programmable optical fabric for the efficient interconnect of chiplets and other silicon ICs.

Klinger explains that they are trying to solve the problem of efficiently accessing all of the bandwidth on one chip and sharing it with another chip. If they can improve the interconnect bandwidth density, it will allow performance scaling to continue increasing at the workload level. Klinger emphasizes, "There are data centers with hundreds of millions of dollars of GPUs sitting idle, waiting for the network topology or the interconnects to catch up."

So, join our host, Daniel Bogdanoff, in this deep dive into silicon photonics with Klinger. In this discussion, they address many fascinating topics, including:

- What makes silicon photonics unique from traditional photonics?

- The common traits shared by Klinger's previous $1B+ startups.

- The many job openings available at LightMatter.

Freeing EEs to Design Like Tony Stark May 07, 2024

Show notes

While leading the system design of new head-word displays for fighter pilots, Tomide Adesanmi was most excited when he got a chance to innovate. However, like most electronics design engineers, he found that the majority of his time was spent searching distributor sites for components, drawing symbols, and working with spreadsheets.

Engineers can also relate to the anxiety he felt, worrying that he might have made a silly mistake by missing a tiny detail on "page 243 of the datasheet" for a microcontroller. So, he quit his job to try to tackle the mundane problems of design using "good software, good algorithms, and electronics." A few months later, Circuit Mind was founded.

Adesanmi and the Circuit Mind team aim to allow designers to quickly optimize designs with variable weighting on size, power, cost, parts availability, and more. Our Moore's Lobby audience of electronics engineers will definitely want to listen in as our host, Daniel Bogdanoff, and Adesanmi chat about the possible future of circuit design. You will hear:

-Why it is important that Circuit Mind uses deterministic algorithms as opposed to machine learning.

-Defining the team and roles necessary to build these new tools.

-What company makes the best datasheets?

Contact Circuit Mind to schedule an appointment to learn more, get a demo, receive a quote, or even run a trial of your design on the ACE platform.

Cooperation and Competition Behind the Scenes in the RISC-V Community Apr 23, 2024

Show notes

Over the course of his fascinating career, Mark Himelstein has worked on several significant computing technologies at historic companies like MIPS and Sun Microsystems. He has also worked as a consultant in various roles that include architect, VP of engineering, and advisor. However, RISC-V may have a greater impact on the computing field and our world than any of those previous efforts.

Himelstein gives us an insiders view on the open standard process that is often "cooperation and competition, simultaneously."

"The thing that keeps us as a community is the effort in the software ecosystem. Nobody wants to really go off and go on their own. They just don't want to do it. It's just too costly. I don't care if you're the biggest company in the world or the tiniest."

Listen in on this episode of the Moore's Lobby podcast as Daniel Bogdanoff and Himelstein chat about a wide range of interesting topics that include:

-How Himelstein encourages people to get involved with RISC-V by telling them to not just complain about something, but join in to help make it better.

-The significance of vector operations for computing and how those advantages may soon be extended to matrix operations within the ISA.

-Three major things RISC-V is currently working on for future release.

At Silicon Labs, Wireless IoT is Only The First Step in Rethinking Product Design Apr 09, 2024

Show notes

Daniel Cooley started his career in RF chip design at Silicon Labs and now leads technology and product development at "the number one wireless supplier" for the Internet of Things. In this thoughtful interview, Cooley explains why adding wireless connectivity is only the first step to completely rethinking product designs and features. He noted that "the home run cases aren't where wireless is the feature; it's where wireless made that product better."

Cooley explains that Silicon Labs' primary goal is to help companies get started with their preferred wireless protocol quickly and efficiently so they can focus on their applications instead of trying to debug the wireless links. Silicon Labs' experience was forged on having "cut our teeth selling more than a billion wireless chips over many, many years."

Our Moore's Lobby host, Daniel Bogdanoff, chats with Cooley about a range of fascinating topics that include:

-Building wireless products for "metal benders."

-The surprising economic benefits of adding wireless connectivity to shelf labels.

-An explanation of the Matter protocol and why it is important.

-The Silicon Labs partnership with Arduino.

-Why the sky is falling…or at least the cloud is coming down.

-Reflection on a major project and when Cooley "realized none of it was going to work."

-Why Cooley believes we will see a rethinking of the Internet infrastructure around non-human electronic devices.

Pragmatic Semi is Breaking the Rules and Bending Silicon Electronics Mar 26, 2024

Show notes

While Moore's Law scaling has driven incredible advancements in computing, AI, and smartphones, many applications don't need or benefit from the most advanced semiconductor nodes. From its inception, Pragmatic Semiconductor's goal has been to take a…well, pragmatic…approach to develop an ultra low-cost, fast cycle time alternative to traditional silicon processing. Oh, and did we mention that the resulting chips and wafers are also flexible?

You will definitely want to check out this Moore's Lobby conversation between White and our host, Daniel Bogdanoff, as they dive into:

-The technology and manufacturing of thin-film silicon

-Europe's largest-ever VC funding for a semiconductor company

-The potential advantages of flexible silicon for building a more robust supply chain

-White's top priorities for improving the flexible silicon ecosystem

State of the Industry: Semiconductor Insiders Discuss the Ambitions and Realities of the CHIPS Act Mar 12, 2024

Show notes

The chip shortage made us all think about the precarious semiconductor supply chain. In response, the US government has moved to bolster the domestic industry. The CHIPS and Science Act was signed into law in August 2022, but we are still waiting to see its impact on US semiconductor manufacturing.

In this podcast, we are joined by three industry insiders:

Rich Simoncic, EVP of Microchip Technology.

Russ Garcia, CEO of Menlo Micro.

Michael Knight, President & CEO at Endries International.

They will give us their perspective on the CHIPS Act and what should be done to improve the supply chain. In this engaging discussion, the group is hosted by our Moore's Lobby host, Daniel Bogdanoff. Their discussion includes:

-The confusing relationship between the CHIPS Act and the current state of the supply chain.

-The challenges of getting advanced R&D across the "valley of death."

-Is it enough?

-The technologies and nodes that might be overlooked.

-What should a CHIPS Act 2 invest in?

Leading the RISC-V Revolution, SiFive Aims to Take the Computing Industry Throne Feb 27, 2024

Show notes

During his fascinating career, Jack Kang has had the opportunity to work on iconic, massively successful products like the Microsoft Xbox Kinect and Nintendo Switch. Today, as one of the founding members of SiFive, Kang works alongside several of the creators of the RISC-V ISA to bring new products to market.

SiFive is developing products based on the open RISC-V standard to deliver high-performance, low-power density processors for applications from wearables to data centers, edge computing, and aerospace.

The highlights of this conversation between Kang and our Moore's Lobby host, Daniel Bogdanoff, include:

-His big career break

-The transition from huge companies to a startup

-Open-source versus open-standard

-The security system that SiFive donated to the RISC-V community

Quantum Computing: Sci-Fi Technology Requires Real-World Engineering Feb 13, 2024

Show notes

A decade after demonstrating the first entanglement of semiconducting spin quantum bits, or qubits, Oliver Dial and IBM Quantum are developing the ICs, cryogenic systems, error mitigation techniques, and software tools that will identify solutions to problems beyond the scope of classical computers. Recently, the IBM Quantum team announced the Heron 133-qubit and Condor 1,121-qubit quantum processors, and Dial joins us to talk about a subject that he loves.

The highlights of this conversation between Dial and our Moore's Lobby host, Daniel Bogdanoff, include:

A comparison of quantum and classic Turing computing systems.
Temperatures down to 0.1 kelvin (brrr!) to noise temperatures of 30,000 kelvin (hotter than the sun, but not really).
An audio symphony of quantum circuits running computations from around the world.
Qubits are probably much bigger than you would expect.
Why packaging engineers are the unsung heroes of the semiconductor and quantum industries.
Semiconductor engineers telling quantum engineers, "you guys are doing these all wrong."
The technology advance in the newer Heron processor that Dial is most excited about.

Energizing the Future: Real-Time Precision in Renewable Energy Management Jan 30, 2024

Show notes

Optimizing energy generation and consumption requires accurately measuring currents and voltages. In addition, to maximize overall efficiency, that data must be shared in real-time or near real-time.

The highlights of this conversation between Henrik Mannesson of Texas Instruments and host Daniel Bogdanoff include discussing:

-The differences between power management in the home or small factory and power management at the grid.

-The evolution from smart metering to energy management.

-The importance of accuracy in power measurement and how to achieve it.

-The benefits of staying with a single company for many years.