It’s innovator season at Embedded Computing Design, and every year it gets harder for the editorial team to choose winners because so many in the embedded space are doing great things. We had an excellent turnout of Top Embedded Innovator nominations this year, which made it very difficult to narrow the pool down to the top three. Besides our three winners – T.J. Rodgers, Cypress Semiconductor, Jean Labrosse, Micrium, and Dr. Stan Schneider, Real-Time Innovations (RTI) – we thought six nominees stood out as deserving recognition as honorable mentions:

Marko Kiiskila, Principal Engineer, Ayla Networks
Kiiskila has been a major innovator in the industry’s first Agile IoT Platform. He developed an Over the Air (OTA) update process (patent pending) that uses patches with embedded devices. Kiiskila also architected Ayla’s Agile IoT Platform to be device agnostic, easy to use, and connect any device to the cloud without writing any device specific code.

Ween Niu, General Manager, USA, Advantech
Since taking the post as GM, Niu has achieved 3,000 percent growth for Advantech. His direction and guidance to realign the organization to have better vertical market support was unique and demonstrated out-of-the-box thinking. Niu also gives back to the community. His contributions and focus on raising awareness within the organization on charities such as Human Option and Second Harvest Food Bank have elevated and inspired the company’s drive and passion.

Glenn Perry, Vice President and GM of Mentor Graphics Embedded Systems Division, Mentor Graphics Corporation
Perry helped established the electronic industry’s largest embedded software portfolio and ecosystem based on enabling technologies and partnerships to advance embedded development. This includes an automotive software portfolio that spans every aspect of embedded software in the vehicle.

Costas Pipilas, VP of Software Development and Co-Founder, Econais
Pipilas’ rethinking of the integration of Wi-Fi modules as native to electric and electronic devices simplifies the upgrading of existing devices into IoT devices. Additionally, ProbMe, a mass configuration capability that ensures improved security and rapid installations for both consumers and installers, allows many devices to be installed configured to the network instantly.

Rose Schooler, VP, IoT Strategy and Technology, Intel
Schooler helps deliver platforms for networking and storage. She is also responsible for enabling solutions for telecommunications service providers. Schooler joined Intel as a graduate rotation engineer and progressed all the way through the company to her present position.

Vegard Wollan, Vice President and General Manager, Touch Business Unit, Atmel Corporation
Wollan is the co-inventor of the AVR microcontroller architecture. In addition, he saw the need for an MCU-based flash memory, which could be reprogrammed as often as needed, even in-circuit. Wollan also helped to organically develop a community of more than 230,000 members in the AVR Freaks community to discuss technical the AVR architecture.