Moore's Lobby: Where engineers talk all about circuits

Steve Orrin (self-described former hacker and undeniable math zealot) stands firmly at the crossroads between the public and private sectors, precisely where cybersecurity intersects with them both. From his viewpoint, it's a myth that the government is slow to adopt progressive technologies. Or, more accurately, reality resides in a nuanced gray area where Predator drones are outfitted with cutting-edge security and, somehow, painfully slow cloud adoption is actually a blessing in disguise.

In this episode, you'll hear about the impact of AI and quantum computing on cybersecurity, the "new math, new hardware" of next-gen cryptography, and how the heck to bring classified materials into the work-from-home environment of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Additional highlights from this episode include:

• A shockingly accessible explanation of homomorphic cryptography
• The unique joys of having Bruce Schneier rip one's carefully crafted cryptography stack to shreds
• How a security expert chooses a baby monitor these days
• Why maybe we should be designing security systems with our moms in mind

In this Industry Tech Days Keynote, we have an all-star panel of industry experts to talk about the ramifications of the global chip shortage and what lessons we can learn from them. You'll hear from Dave Doherty, President and COO of distributor Digi-Key Electronics, Steve Sanghi, Executive Chair of semiconductor manufacturer Microchip Technology, and Michael Knight, Corporate Senior Vice President of Business Development of distributor TTI.

2021 brought us the first functioning 2 nm chip, a milestone accomplished by a team at IBM Research, one of the foremost research institutions on the planet for the electronics industry.

In the upper echelons of this prestigious group is Dr. Jeffrey Welser, the Vice President of Exploratory Science and University Partnerships for IBM. In this episode of Moore's Lobby, Dr. Welser talks with Daniel about everything from quantum computing to CMOS devices to neural networks.

Two engineering students developed an autonomous golf cart system to transport people across campus. One accelerator program and a lot of engineering later, the same two engineers founded Embark, an autonomous trucking company that rapidly grew into a $5 billion endeavor. 

In 2018, when the company was only two years old, Embark claimed an industry-first: a 2,400-mile coast-to-coast journey for an autonomous truck from LA to Jacksonville, Florida. For the first time in many people's minds, autonomous trucking seemed to have arrived.

This is the story of Brandon Moak and Alex Rodrigues, CTO and CEO respectively of Embark. Moak joins us in the Lobby to talk about the challenges of scalable autonomous systems, gaining acceptance in the transportation industry, and the differences between passenger autonomous vehicles and those meant for the infrastructure of shipping.

What do Lady Gaga, DreamWorks, and SpaceX have in common? Would you believe us if we said the answer was tech? In this episode, two top HP execs talk about the unexpected ways this giant in the industry has gone from the inventors of the inkjet printer to Oscar-winning staple in Hollywood, healthcare, and some out-of-this-world applications.

Joining Daniel in the Lobby today are Jim Nottingham, Global Head & General Manager of HP’s Advanced Compute & Solutions, and Bruce Blaho, HP Fellow and Chief Technologist for the Advanced Compute & Solutions Business Unit in HP Personal Systems. Daniel guides Jim and Bruce through a conversation about HP's monolithic presence in the history of the electronics industry and how precision engineering has revolutionized display technology just in time for the age of remote work.

This trio of engineers delves into color fidelity across displays, data capture and storage, AI and machine learning, high-performance and edge compute, and the new wave of AR/VR.

Highlights you won't want to miss:

• What are HP's plans for an EGOT? (No, seriously.)
• What does "the HP way" mean nowadays?
• How does DreamWorks keep Shrek's signature green the same from one display to another?
• How do you get unneeded workstation equipment off the ISS? 
• What's next after keyboards and mouses? 

In their conversation, Victor, Michael, and Daniel will discuss what it's like to walk in space, the technologies that are propelling space exploration, and the importance of engineers in making aerospace history.

Arduino recently announced a monumental change in its new efforts towards producing affordable, scalable hardware for industrial automation applications. Hear the how and why of Arduino's jump from the hobbyist bench to the factory floor.

The advent of AI is forcing us to rethink the way we design hardware and changing the way we think of processing. After all, data-hungry applications are processor-hungry applications. 

In this episode of Moore’s Lobby, Daniel speaks with Michael Kagan, the CTO of NVIDIA, a tech giant and household name in processing. Kagan’s career spans foundational work across Intel, Mellanox, and now NVIDIA as they forge new technologies to enable accelerated compute.

Learn about the three core pillars of data center computing (spoilers: “GPU” might not mean what you think it means anymore). And learn why compute will soon need to become service-based as the burden of processing shifts increasingly to supercomputers.

And, of course, hear the historic reasons Kagan asserts that “chips without software is just expensive sand.”

You won’t find a more qualified voice on the intersection between processing, compute-hungry applications, and data centers, so don’t miss this episode.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. How do you get hardware engineers to attend a seminar about security?

Tell them it's a free buffet and then lock the doors behind them before you start the slide deck.

To put it mildly, security is not hardware designers' favorite topic. But with millions of unsecured devices in the market, it's quickly becoming an issue the industry can't ignore. 

Join our new host for Season 3, Daniel Bogdanoff, for this episode of Moore's Lobby that kicks off Season 3 with DARPA Program Manager at the Microsystems Technology Office (MTO), Serge Leef. Leef's storied background in design automation gives him a unique perspective on his current work as someone who helps select promising projects in the competitive world of DARPA funding.

Tune in to get a clear breakdown of the security issues facing hardware devices, including a look at the types of attacks DARPA has on its radar. You'll hear about the similarities and differences of securing missile control systems compared to smart toilets. And, perhaps most importantly, you'll be faced with the very real question of whether hardware security is something we should entrust to design engineers at all.

Along the way, you'll get answers to burning questions you never knew you had, like:

• How is a DARPA program manager like a movie producer?
• How is IC-level hardware design like fluoride? And
• How is designing for security like selling vitamins?

Season 3 of Moore's Lobby serves up conversations with some of the most fascinating luminaries in the electronics industry. 

Join host Daniel Bogdanoff as he geeks out with CTOs, inventors, astronauts, and more about the technologies that are changing the world.

Google is one of the most prominent corporations in history. Since its founding in 1998, it's gone from a scrappy startup in Silicon Valley to the portal through which most people access the internet. 

How do you even begin to design compute infrastructure that massive?

This week on Moore's Lobby, Dave talks with TWO Google Senior VPs of Engineering, Google Fellows Luiz Barroso and Amin Vahdat. 

In this conversation, you'll hear about the early days of Google, back when their data centers were barely more than broom closets and the team was "unencumbered by expertise" in data center design. You'll hear about the off-the-wall iterations of their early data center ideas (like that time Google put their data centers into shipping containers, which is way more reasonable than it may sound at first). You'll hear about the incredible promise of the applications Google's tackling today—and the costs that come with that world-changing power.

On the way, you'll learn more about two electrical engineers who came from very different backgrounds, pursued different specialties in academia, and yet ended up working together on some of the most extraordinary challenges facing compute in the modern era. 

This episode will illuminate the past and future of Google from the engineering side and how “healthy hubris” leads to "a healthy disregard for the impossible.”

Meet Luiz Barroso and Amin Vahdat

Luiz Barroso

Luiz André Barroso is a Google Fellow leading the office of Cross-Google Engineering (XGE) from where he coordinates key technical initiatives that span multiple Google products. Over his two decades at Google he has worked as a VP of Engineering in the Core and Maps teams, and was a technical leader in areas such as Google Search and the design of Google’s computing platform.

Luiz has published several technical papers and has co-authored “The Datacenter as a Computer”, the first textbook to describe the architecture of warehouse-scale computing systems, now in its 3rd edition. Luiz is a Fellow of the ACM and the AAAS, and holds B.S. and M.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the Pontifícia Universidade Católica of Rio de Janeiro and a Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from the University of Southern California. Recently he was awarded the 2020 Eckert-Mauchly Award.

Amin Vahdat

Amin Vahdat is a Google Fellow and Technical Lead for networking at Google. He has contributed to Google’s data center, wide area, edge/CDN, and cloud networking infrastructure,
with a particular focus on driving vertical integration across large-scale compute, networking, and storage.

In the past, he was the SAIC Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at UC San Diego and the Director of UCSD’s Center for Networked Systems. Vahdat received his PhD from UC Berkeley in Computer Science, is an ACM Fellow and a past recipient of the NSF CAREER award, the Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, and the Duke University David and Janet Vaughn Teaching Award.

Microchip Technology is so recognizable in the semiconductor industry that it's hard to contemplate that it struggled rather a lot in its early years. From its split from General Instrument to its rocky beginnings as a company teetering on the edge of bankruptcy and on through its remarkable 121 consecutive profitable quarters, Microchip has fought for every inch of success it's achieved.

In the middle of it all has been Steve Sanghi, CEO from 1990 until 2021, when he took on the role of Executive Chair. Steve has been an active driver in the industry, taking a "different-by-design"—or even straight-up risky—perspective in his approach to technology and leadership.

In this episode of Moore's Lobby, Dave guides us through highlights of Steve's storied history of guiding Microchip into the modern era. Hear stories that paint a clear, oftentimes surprising portrait of the industry.

Identifying what technology is going to change the world next is a superpower everyone wishes they had. If you could see where advancements were being made and where funds were being invested—and if you had the vision to act on what you saw—what could you accomplish?

This is basically a job description for the CTO of Microsoft US, who is our guest this week on Moore's Lobby. Gina Loften is an electrical engineer, leader, author, and executive whose purpose is to identify the next big technologies, lead one of the most advanced teams of engineers on the planet to create solutions for them, and then help the largest corporations adopt them into their processes seamlessly. 

Loften has been on the front lines of AI for years, from the public introduction of IBM's Watson to the new battlefield of bringing AI to the edge, which stands to affect everything from healthcare to retail. She has a unique perspective on what it means for engineers to specialize in a particular field and why they should care about what the next technological revolution brings.

In this episode, Loften discusses the rapidly evolving technology industry and how engineers should see themselves within it. As Loften puts it, "The world does not work without engineers."

About five years ago, we reached the tipping point where it became cheaper to build a new wind farm than to build a conventional thermal power plant. Now we’re staring down the barrel of a second tipping point, where it will be cheaper to build a new wind farm than it will be to operate an existing conventional power plant.

In this episode, Dave speaks with the VP and CTO of GE Renewable Energy, Dr. Danielle Merfeld, about the current state of renewables. 

You’ll hear valuable advice about following your passions from an executive at one of the largest technology corporations on the planet who is both young and an electrical engineer. From her decision to pursue her Ph.D. to the role of company culture in finding the right people to work with, Dr. Merfeld humanizes the engineering processes that are driving the future of renewables.

Learn about where we stand on the key concepts of energy diversity, storage, and transmission. Hear the challenges of educating people on a subject that’s often misunderstood and also evolving rapidly. And listen in as an executive truly nerds out about “imminently manageable” power electronics in renewables.

For some, it's a prototyping tool. For others, it's a gateway to freedom of expression. 

It's been a powerful tool for STEM education, an object of scorn, and the hardware platform that's launched a thousand Kickstarters.

But no matter what your expectations are, Arduino will surprise you in 2021.

Hear all about the origins of Arduino as an exercise in usability and open-source philosophy. Learn how Arduino transformed the maker movement and vice versa. And listen in as the co-founder of one of the most popular hardware platforms on Earth talks about the beauty and backlash of making hardware simple enough for all.

This episode has a wealth of insights about the nature of creativity in design, but it also has several excellent quotes from Massimo Banzi, including:

• “So I showed up with a bunch of potatoes and lemons…”
• "When they looked at Arduino, they said, 'What the hell is this thing?'"
• "...you, as a developer, were expected to be a professional. So you were supposed to suffer a little bit, you know?"
• "The world is full of grumpy engineers."

and, of course,

• "Baby talk for potheads."

Meet Massimo Banzi

Massimo Banzi is the co-founder of Arduino, one of the most popular hardware platforms in history. He is an electrical engineer and educator, as well as a self-described open-source advocate.

An important part of Massimo's career is his background in interaction design, which has provided him formal training on how to make hardware accessible to everyone. 

Banzi has been a professor at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Southern Switzerland (SUPSI), the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design, the Domus Academy, and the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea. He's also co-founded two FabLabs—digital fabrication labs—in his home country of Italy.

In addition to his work with Arduino, Massimo has served as a consultant for brands like Prada, Whirlpool, and Adidas.

To say that autonomous vehicles represent a huge number of engineering challenges is an understatement. To some engineers, they seem insurmountable. To others, like Mo ElShenawy, they're part of another day at the office.

This week, Dave speaks with Mo ElShenawy, Senior VP of Engineering for Cruise. Cruise began as a startup out of Y Combinator and rose to prominence as a powerhouse of machine vision and data processing for autonomous vehicle development. Acquired by GM in 2016, Cruise today works with companies like Honda and Microsoft to bring fully autonomous (and zero emissions) vehicles to scale. 

Mo runs Cruise's largest department, leading 1,000+ engineers in what is arguably one of the most significant engineering challenges of our generation. In this episode, you’ll hear Dave and Mo discuss the hardware and software challenges of designing AVs, why AVs should be safer than human drivers, and why Mo doesn’t believe in “tech for tech’s sake.” 

Meet Mo ElShenawy

Mohamed “Mo” ElShenawy’s career has spanned several unique industries that share a unifying need for scalable automation technologies. He joined Cruise in 2018, where he now leads over 1,000 engineers as Senior Vice President of Engineering as the team tackles safe, scalable AV deployment, starting with San Francisco.

"Smart city" isn't exactly an engineering term. And yet engineers are responsible for developing the technologies that take a city from being advanced to being "smart," including wireless communications, sensor fusion, and machine-learning algorithms implemented to serve public life. 

But it turns out the real hurdles in the way of smart city technologies are much more human and complex than we may realize.

In this episode, Dave speaks with Karen Lightman, the Executive Director of Carnegie Mellon's Metro21 Smart Cities Institute about how engineering and public policy work hand-in-hand in smart cities. Hear about the tragedies of falling in love with a chip design that doesn't have a market, the dangers of avoiding standards in the tech industry, and the importance of testing smart city technologies in real-world "living laboratories"—or "living sandboxes," as Karen prefers to call them.

Dr. Aaron Edsinger spent years at MIT CSAIL's Humanoid Robotics Group, building robots in the shape of human torsos under the tutelage of world-renowned roboticist Rodney Brooks. It may seem strange, then, that the flagship product at his latest startup, Hello Robot, doesn't look human at all. 

Listen in to hear about how Edsinger views the difference between startups and corporate life when it comes to innovation that truly serves people and communities well, from the iterative design process down to the pragmatism of simple design.

Edsinger has run the gamut from founding robotics startups to Head of Robotics at Google to founding robotics startups acquired by Google. Throughout, he's gained unique perspective on what it means to design robotics that are designed for the market and how that differs from designs that are market-ready. 

This week in the Lobby, we have one of the original leaders of the single-board computer (SBC) industry, Jason Kridner of BeagleBoard.org, whose BeagleBone line of open-source SBCs is manufactured by Texas Instruments in partnership with Digi-Key and Newark element14. 

In this episode, Jason and Dave get into the importance of rapid prototyping for embedded systems in an era where time-to-market trumps all.

Core to this episode is the democratization of working with neural networks through SBCs like BeagleBoard AI. How will the industry change as access to developing machine learning algorithms becomes more common? And how responsible are developers for bias in AI, anyway?

Tune in for a great conversation about hardware, ethics, and embedded prototyping!

Did you know that changing the size of a quantum dot changes the color it emits without altering any other properties? This deceptively simple fact goes down to the quantum level, where the color of a quantum dot can be controlled by changing how many nanometers across it is.

In this episode of Moore's Lobby, we're diving into what Dr. Seth Coe-Sullivan calls "the quantum weirdness" as we explore the concepts of nanotechnology and quantum dots. 

Coe-Sullivan is the CEO, President, and co-founder of NS Nanotech, a company that is blazing trails towards the next paradigm shift in display technologies while at the same time releasing practical far-UVC products used to battle viruses in healthcare applications.

You'll hear Seth demystify many of the most complex and cutting-edge concepts that will govern how sharp and bright displays will be in the future, from AR/VR to mobile device screens to digital signage. And you'll get a crash course in nanotechnology straight from one of the leading experts in the field.