Author:
Jason Lomberg, North American Editor, PSD
Date
03/21/2025
PDF
Jason Lomberg, North American Editor, PSD
So?? How was APEC? Was it everything you hoped for (with a side of peaches, pecans, and chicken & waffles)?
This was my fourth time to Atlanta, having been in the military years ago (Georgia is an Army epicenter), on vacation, and to a gorgeous destination wedding there. And even after having my fill of southern-fried cuisine, Coca-Cola, the Braves, and every nook and cranny of this bustling metropolis (and hub of the Civil Rights Movement), I never tire of it.
All of this is to say that APEC chose well in 2025.
As per usual, I reconnected with old friends and colleagues and a few new faces. I even met my longtime European co-worker, Ally Winning, for the very first time, and traipsed around the Georgia World Congress Center and two separate business dinners together.
To no one’s surprise, AI absolutely dominated this year’s show, with the tech infiltrating every corner of the industry…for better or worse. While I’m more than a little anxious hearing about AI lying to humans, outwitting them, and making flesh-and-blood creatures increasingly superfluous, the industry is finding clever ways to upgrade existing processes and leverage AI’s strengths to improve the design cycle and facilitate the IoT and smart technologies.
Prior to the show, we chatted with the CEO and Co-founder of EPC, Alex Lidow, about how GaN is revolutionizing AI infrastructure, humanoid robotics, and industrial and consumer applications.
Indeed, AI will play a pivotal role in Industry 4.0, and one hopes we can maintain control over something that thinks exponentially quicker than us.
Because AI is absolutely becoming an indispensable component in all the aforementioned applications, including and especially the industry side, the latter of which is the focus of our April issue.
In one part of that, SEGGER discusses “A new approach to real-time operating systems for embedded systems” and the differences between super-loop architectures, traditional real-time operating systems, and an RTOS from the company that uses cycle-resolution timing.
The approaches that don’t utilize cycle-resolution timing cause a number of issues – like a SysTick event with no pending task that causes an “empty” interrupt, unnecessarily burdening the processor.
But with cycle-resolution timing, and as explained by SEGGER’s Dirk Akemann, “the RTOS has flexible system tick interrupts available to precisely schedule any future task without further side effects. Thus, they can be specified in system-independent, high-resolution units such as milliseconds, microseconds, or even hardware counter cycles instead of system ticks.”
He goes on to discuss how SEGGER’s RTOS, embOS-Ultra, optimizes power usage and reliably handles signal processing tasks, making it a perfect fit for medical applications, amongst others.
Enjoy the April issue!
Best Regards,
Jason Lomberg
North American Editor, PSD
