Cooperation and Competition Behind the Scenes in the RISC-V Community
Moore's Lobby: Where engineers talk all about circuits
Release Date: 04/23/2024
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...
info_outlineMoore'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...
info_outlineMoore'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...
info_outlineMoore'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...
info_outlineMoore'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...
info_outlineMoore'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...
info_outlineMoore'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...
info_outlineMoore'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...
info_outlineMoore'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...
info_outlineMoore'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_outlineOver 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.