Burning Man Maker, Music Mogul, and PCB Revolutionary—Flux CEO Matthias Wagner
Moore's Lobby: Where engineers talk all about circuits
Release Date: 05/02/2023
Navigating the AI Revolution in Education, Workforce Development, and Government
Moore's Lobby: Where engineers talk all about circuits
The interview explores K S Venkatraman's journey in technology, NVIDIA’s growth, and the future of AI. Venkatraman reflects on his academic upbringing and early experiments with electronics. He reflects on his that began at Intel and eventually transitioned to NVIDIA after a brief startup venture. In this conversation with our Moore’s Lobby host, Daniel Bogdanoff, Venkatraman delves into pivotal technological advancements. This includes the development of GPUs for AI and the role of hardware-software co-design in fueling the AI revolution. Looking ahead, Venkatraman envisions AI addressing...
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GaN Powers Up in AI, Robotics, and Our Lives
Moore's Lobby: Where engineers talk all about circuits
In this fascinating interview, Alex Lidow discusses his early exposure to semiconductors through his father and grandfather, who founded International Rectifier. Initially pursuing aeronautical engineering at Caltech, he shifted to solid-state physics, igniting a lifelong career. He shares his role in developing HexFETs, a groundbreaking transistor technology, highlighting the creativity and persistence required for innovation. After being unexpectedly dismissed from International Rectifier, Alex founded EPC to focus on GaN technology. He details GaN’s superior properties, such as high...
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Technology and AI Leap Ahead, While Societal Institutions Race To Catch Up
Moore's Lobby: Where engineers talk all about circuits
Discover the fascinating journey of Amar Gupta, a technologist and educator at MIT, as he shares insights into his groundbreaking work across industries. In this interview with our host, Daniel Bogdanoff, Gupta reflects on his early passion for innovation, which included the development of electronic check-processing systems that revolutionized global banking. Gupta’s contributions to telemedicine are equally compelling. Hear how he saw the potential of remote healthcare decades before it became mainstream, overcoming resistance and shaping policies like the U.S. Department of Veterans...
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QSPICE Circuit Simulation: A Spicy Discussion with Mike Engelhardt
Moore's Lobby: Where engineers talk all about circuits
If you are interested in electronics, history, or simple amazing stories, you will enjoy this podcast interview with our Moore’s Lobby host, Daniel Bogdanoff. Mike Engelhardt has been developing simulation tools since 1975. He is best known for creating LTspice, which is believed to be the most widely distributed and used SPICE analog electronic circuit simulator in the world. Recently, he realized that he could take advantage of the massive improvements in both hardware and software to develop a radically improved circuit simulation engine; thus, QSPICE was born. Engelhardt explains how he...
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Improving Electronic Design Collaboration by Shifting Left and Right
Moore's Lobby: Where engineers talk all about circuits
Ananth Avva is “a big believer that if you give human beings the right type of information and you contextualize it, they will make the right decision ultimately for the organization.” In his current role at Altium as the Senior Vice President and General Manager of Cloud Platform, he is leading efforts to improve and accelerate collaboration because “collaboration trumps everything else” as it drives speed to market, lower costs, and more efficient development. He has seen companies attempt to transition engineering teams to software-as-a-service (SaaS). In his experience, “that...
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5G and IoT: What Will It Take for Them to Get Along?
Moore's Lobby: Where engineers talk all about circuits
Thomas Keller is the Director of Platforms and Core Technology at u-blox. He learned early in his career that technology development does not always progress in a perfectly straight line. During his PhD studies, he worked on Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiplexing (OFDM) as a candidate technology for 3G cellular network deployment. OFDM lost that initial tech battle to Code-Division Multiple Access (CDMA) but later returned in LTE cellular systems. In this fascinating conversation, Keller discusses the challenges facing the industry today as low-power, low-bandwidth, low-cost IoT devices...
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Looking Down to Go Forward: Ground Penetrating Radar for Autonomous Vehicles
Moore's Lobby: Where engineers talk all about circuits
If you enjoy hearing passionate people talk about jobs they love and technology that fascinates them, you are in for a treat. Noah Gedrimas grew up with a love of vehicles—cars, tractors, construction equipment, and snowmobiles. In college, he built a one-fifth-scale car and then programmed it to self-park, which led him to a “newfound respect for mechatronics” and its ability to support really complex maneuvers. In this interview, Gedrimas reflects with enthusiasm on his time at Continental Automotive, working on everything from autonomous valet parking to electric shuttles and...
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Changing the World One Wireless RF Chip at a Time
Moore's Lobby: Where engineers talk all about circuits
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...
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Can Silicon Photonics Solve the Bandwidth Bottleneck in AI Data Centers?
Moore's Lobby: Where engineers talk all about circuits
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...
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Freeing EEs to Design Like Tony Stark
Moore's Lobby: Where engineers talk all about circuits
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...
info_outlineMatthias Wagner learned early in his career that not everything is like an engineering “marketing video…all so streamlined and perfect.” Sometimes you have to dive into a project with no documentation and no roadmap and “figure it out now.” That fearless, can-do attitude has led him on a circuitous and amazing route into, out of, and now back into the electronics world where he is leading Flux as they try to remake the PCB design flow.
While others have previously tried and failed, Wagner recognized that many of these were “too small of dreams to make any meaningful change…you just need to start from scratch.”
And yeah, that's scary. And it's a lot of work, don't get me wrong, it's very hard. But then what else were you going to do with your time that was worthwhile?
One of Wagner’s career pivots was out of the electronics industry and into the music industry. In this fascinating interview, Wagner reflects on that decision and states, “that was a really dumb idea at the time, but I made it work.” And, boy, did he ever! During his foray into the music industry, Wagner’s work sold over 1 billion units across the globe and was honored with platinum and gold records. His song, Axel F by Crazy Frog, has nearly 3.8 billion (yes, billion with a b) views on YouTube.
And we haven’t even mentioned his experiences developing energy systems for Burning Man that then lead to working at Facebook on products with billions of users. You will just have to listen to hear about those. And, after listening to this episode, you might be inspired to “give yourself permission to dream big dreams.”
Other highlights from this Moore’s Lobby interview with Matthias Wagner include:
-Why hardware engineers are jealous of software developers
-The competition between hard core gamers and general users when developing Oculus
-What the PCB and electronics industry can learn from developments in the music industry
-Learning how to run a business by NOT running a business