TELUS CTO on Open RAN - Decision, Experience & Advice
Tantra's Mantra with Prakash Sangam
Release Date: 05/31/2024
Apple WWDC 2025 - Recap and Analysis
Tantra's Mantra with Prakash Sangam
This year's Apple developers conference, WWDC, was held from June 9th to 13th. It saw many interesting announcements, including a harmonized version naming across all the OSs, interesting Apple Intelligence, and other features supported on Apple products. In this episode, Next Curve's Leonard Lee and I discuss the event's key takeaways, including Apple opening access to its on-device LLM to app developers, Apple Intelligence, iPadOS crossing the boundary into Laptop territory, new features coming to MacOS, and how many VisionOS features are entering other products. We also delve into...
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Aduna CEO on Opportunities and Challenges of Network APIs
Tantra's Mantra with Prakash Sangam
Network APIs are heralded as a game changer in the ongoing struggle of 5G operators to make a good return on their enormous investments in building these highly capable networks. Unlike previous attempts, stars might be aligning this time to make APIs successful. Aduna was formed by a collaborative effort between Infra major Ericsson and scores of handpicked large global 5G operators. In this episode, I speak to Anthony Bartolo, CEO of Aduna. We discuss the reasons for Aduna’s existence, how it collaborates with the GSMA’s Open Gateway initiative and the Linux Foundation’s CAMARA...
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A primer on Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) with Peter Voss
Tantra's Mantra with Prakash Sangam
AI is jumping from one hype cycle to another. First, it was simple AI, then came Generative AI, and currently, we are reeling from Agentic AI. The new term is already lurking—Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). Actually, AGI is pretty old, dating back to the early 2000s. What is it, and why is it gathering attention now? I talk to the person who came up with the very term--Peter Voss, CEO & Chief Scientist at Aigo.ai. We delve into how AGI mimics human learning functions, how it differs from Gen AI, why it is cost- and power-efficient by orders of magnitude, whether today's Gen...
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Honeywell is Redefining the Barcode Scanner for the Industrial Age
Tantra's Mantra with Prakash Sangam
Industrial technology giant Honeywell is redefining the noble barcode scanner for the industrial age. In this episode, I speak to Theodore Newman, Senior Manager of Global Application Engineering, and Steph Hobley-Lloyd, Global Offering Manager, about Honeywell’s Swift Decoder SDK. We discuss the needs of barcode scanners for industrial and enterprise use cases, focusing on rapid, high-accuracy batch scanning, integrating the functionality into various types of devices and machines, and how Swift Decoder's flexibility and multi-OS support address these needs. Additionally, we explore how the...
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Cadence VP on their Silicon Business, Chiplets and More
Tantra's Mantra with Prakash Sangam
Cadence is well known for its Electronic Design Automation (EDA) tools. However, it is also building its silicon business, with a collection of various IP blocks, and recently announced a system chipset in collaboration with Arm. In this episode, I talk to David Glasco, VP of Compute Solutions Group at Cadence, about the silicon business, product portfolio, target segments, Chiplets market and its evolution, and other topics. We also delve into the company’s latest system Chiplet announcement, acquisition of Secure IC, how it fits into its silicon strategy, and more.
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Qualcomm SVP/GM on Customized Snapdragon 8 Elite powering Galaxy S25 Series
Tantra's Mantra with Prakash Sangam
Samsung launched its latest flagship Galaxy S25 Series smartphones during its Unpacked event in Jan 2025. This Gen AI powerhouse phone is powered by Qualcomm's latest Snapdragon 8 Elite mobile platform, customized for Galaxy. In this episode, I talk to Chris Patrick, SVP and GM of Qualcomm's Handsets and Wearables business. We discuss the company's long-standing collaboration with Samsung, enabling Galaxy AI on S25 phones, collaboration with Google for optimizing Gemini AI models for the Snapdragon platform, and more. We dig deeper into specific customizations Qualcomm has done for...
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CES 2025 Recap, Analysis and Key Takeaways
Tantra's Mantra with Prakash Sangam
This year, CES saw its highest attendance in the post-COVID era, attracting 141,000 attendees. As usual, the event saw many announcements across technology and product categories. Although AI was everywhere and IoT had a huge presence (albeit without that name), there wasn't a dominant theme. In this episode, Leonard Lee of Next Curve and I analyze what we saw and heard and try to understand the key takeaways. We also discuss how automotive exhibits have changed, how industrial participation is increasing, and how CES has become a non-Chinese global show.
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Lenovo SVP on Copilot+ PCs in Enterprises
Tantra's Mantra with Prakash Sangam
Microsoft tried to redefine PCs in 2025 with the introduction of AI-infused Copilot+ PCs. Lenovo was among the top OEMs to embrace the concept and introduce a wide range of Copilot+ PCs powered by Qualcomm, Intel, and AMD SoCs. In this episode, I speak to Steve Long, SVP of Commercial Business at Lenovo, on traction in the Enterprises, market drivers, new AI use cases, improving the performance of existing functions, the positive effect of Windows 11 refresh, choice of SoC vendors, and more. We also delve deep into how Lenovo employs Gen AI use cases in its operations to showcase key use cases...
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Cadence on EDA Tools, Super Computing 24 announcement, Collaboration with Nvidia and beyond
Tantra's Mantra with Prakash Sangam
Electronic Data Automation (EDA) Tools and their providers, like Cadence, are not widely known but play a critical role in the semiconductor industry. In the episode, I talk to Rob Knoth, Group Director of Strategy and New Ventures at Cadence, about the EDA Tools ecosystem, the company's announcements at the Supercomputing 2024 event, its symbiotic relationship with AI powerhouse Nvidia, application of EDA tools beyond semiconductors and more.
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Ericsson Analyst Conference - Recap & Analysis
Tantra's Mantra with Prakash Sangam
Ericsson held its Analyst Conference on Nov. 7, 2024, at its D-15 Labs Innovation Center in Santa Clara, CA. It was a packed event with many interesting sessions with speakers from Ericsson and scores of its partners, including Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, Meta, AWS, Google Cloud, Dell, Intel, and others. The theme of the event was "Programable High Performance Networks." As expected, the emphasis was on programmability, to scale the network up and down to make it fit the use cases, network scenarios, apps, and service needs. In this episode, Leonard Lee of Next Curve and I discuss Network...
info_outlineTELUS will be the first operator to use Open RAN for not only new 5G deployment but also to replace the legacy 4G network. Although the Government mandate necessitated the replacement, it was still a bold decision. TELUS will also be a multi-vendor true Open RAN deployment, with radios, cloud platform, RAN software, servers, and processors, all coming from different vendors. It expects almost 50% of the network to be Open RAN by the end of 2025.
In this episode, I talk to Nazim Benhadid, CTO of TELUS, on the factors that led to choosing Open RAN, their large-scale live network performance testing, the decision to use look-aside accelerator configuration, and being their own Systems Integrator, as well as his recommendations to the other brownfield operators looking to deploy Open RAN.