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 episode of the podcast. 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.

With the volume of people, the humongous code base, and the geographically disparate design teams, it’s nearly impossible to maintain and track every aspect of a design. With all that said, Rich and Vin talk about this need and the fact that many design teams choose to deploy ancient, rudimentary methods that too often lead to failure. The duo is joined by Neil Stroud, the General Manager for Automotive and Semiconductor at Jama Software. It results in a very lively discussion.

Check out this episode of Dev Talk with Rich and Vin.

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.