Ray Zinn is famous in Silicon Valley, as the 37-year CEO of Micrel, and current author, speaker, and podcaster. After speaking with Embedded Computing Design every week for 52 weeks, we’re putting a w

Obviously, future predictions are just that—predictions. But some people are in a better position that others to predict what’s going to happen in our embedded electronics industry. One such person is

The stock market continues to rise. A) What does that mean to the embedded/electronics/semiconductor industries? And B) How long will it go on?

Clearly these are questions that go way beyond my knowl

More than one President has pledged to bring manufacturing jobs back to the U.S. Some may even argue that it’s taking place. But I suspect we’d all agree that the number of jobs created in that space

It’s a pretty common argument, whether we spend enough on our military. That could be on weapons, personnel, or something else. And it’s tough to get a consensus on the question. In our weekly chat, I

Generally, semiconductor makers fall into one of two camps: high-volume, low-margin products, or low-volume, high-margin products. The proponents of each style would likely argue that their mentality

The CEO of nVidia, Jen-Hsun Huang, spends a lot of time talking about how great his company is and how great their products are. I’d likely agree with that assessment, but the discussion for this week

Just back from CES, it was clear that the electronics content in today’s cars is huge and growing. The question I asked Ray Zinn in our weekly chat, is whether this content is warranted, or whether it

Predictions are easy, mostly because very few people ever go back to check if the prediction came true. Ray Zinn, who has been in our embedded industry longer than most, has a pretty good track record

In our weekly chat, I asked Ray Zinn what he thought was the best thing that happened in our industry, and also the worst thing that happened in our industry this year. In a year that had a lot of goo

A start-up company often starts with a great idea. But it clearly takes WAY more than that. However, many entrepreneurs, or potential entrepreneurs don’t have a clue where to start. Ray Zinn, who ran

Standards are (too) often defined by the larger vendors and they often do so by circumventing the normal channels, simply because they have enough weight to throw around to make this happen. Is this f

President-Elect Trump says he’s going to build a wall to keep out illegal immigrants and do whatever he can to remove those illegals that are already here. Will that have an effect on our industry? Wo

Surprise, surprise. Donald Trump shocked the world and won the U.S. Presidential election. While there are so many things to debate with respect to his candidacy, I asked Ray Zinn on our weekly call w

There have been no shortage of very large companies acquiring or merging with other very large companies. The most recent announcement of Qualcomm buying NXP for somewhere in the neighborhood of $40 b

As we get closer to the election, just days away now, I’ve been asking folks who are not from the U.S. what they think about our candidates. This was actually a pretty easy exercise as I was at a rece

In my back of the woods, small municipalities are often required to write big (really big in some cases) checks to retiring workers for unused sick time. In most businesses, salaried employees general

A well-known bank recently found itself in hot water when it was reported that it was conducting unethical business. In some cases, supervisors were telling their subordinates that they need to contin

Most people are familiar with Kickstarter, the crowdfunding platform that helps Makers get their projects off the ground. Ray Zinn, the longtime CEO of Micrel, and our weekly guest, started his own ve

Everybody knows the workaholic. In fact, you may be one yourself. Work weeks are also a cultural thing, as 50- to 60-hour weeks are norm in Silicon Valley or Japan, but not so much in Europe. I asked