Beyond the Microchip

Episode 009 - Sensors, Microcontrollers, and Community Gardens in Smart Agriculture

“Third place”. The term originated in a 1989 book written by sociologist Ray Oldenberg. It refers to a place separate from Work or Home where humans can facilitate social interaction. The need for Third Places has grown and was extremely exacerbated by the COVID-19 global pandemic. Like many other things, the pandemic accelerated increasing trends: loneliness and obesity.  
According to the World Health Organization: “High-quality social connections are essential to our mental and physical health and our well-being.” The United States Surgeon General has labeled loneliness an ‘epidemic’. The British Medical Journal published a report in late 2021 that concluded “problematic levels of loneliness are experienced by a substantial proportion of the population in many countries.”
 Also according to the WHO: worldwide obesity has nearly tripled since 1975 and as late as 2016, 1.9 billion adults were overweight, of which 650 million were obese.
The good news? Both of these trends are preventable and reversible. Third Places are helping to provide people with the outlet they need to improve their situation and find happiness. There is a Third Place emerging in cities across the world that solves both problems and a lot more: Community Gardens. It could be a rooftop in a densely populated city, or a common area just down the road. Community Gardens provide the benefits of “public relaxation” while also teaching the valuable skill of eating healthy. They also provide a source of STEM education for kids.
 
How could Microchip Technology help accelerate the growth of Third Places like Community Gardens?
 
Links from the episode:
 
 
Guests: 
Ross Satchell 
Toby Sinkinson 

Episode 008 - Embedded Control in Medical Devices and the COVID-19 Global Pandemic

COVID-19 impacted the world. In December of 2019 news reports out of Wuhan, the capital of Central China's Hubei province, detailed the emergence of an atypical pneumonia-like illness that did not respond well to standard treatments. By January 2020 world health officials had identified the 2019 Novel Coronavirus. By February 2020 the World Health Organization had declared the 2019 Novel Coronavirus outbreak a Public Health Emergency of International Concern, and by March 2020 the WHO declared COVID-19 a global pandemic. By April 2020, more than 1 million cases of COVID-19 had been confirmed worldwide. Fast forward to 2023, as of late October there have been over 770 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 - almost 10% of the global population.
 
But it could have been much, much worse.   
 
During the earliest days of the pandemic, hospital systems were flooded with patients and they simply didn't have the capacity to handle the burden of a global population fighting a mysterious new respiratory illness. Supplies were dwindling and they simply could not get enough of the critical devices they needed to treat their patients. While the world was on lockdown scooping up all the webcams and laptop computers it could find, medical device manufacturers were scrambling to keep people alive. 
 
How did Microchip Technology help hospitals fight the COVID-19 pandemic?
 
Links from the episode:
https://www.fda.gov/medical-devices/emergency-use-authorizations-medical-devices/covid-19-emergency-use-authorizations-medical-devices
 
Guests:
Justin Wilson 

Episode 007 - Sensors, Microcontrollers, and Water Conservation in Smart Agriculture

Water is the most precious substance on earth and a primary building block of life. Humans can’t live more than a few days without it. Yet in order to grow, cultivate, process, and transport our food, we waste a tremendous amount of it. So much so that we need to pull more of it out of the ground just to satisfy our agricultural needs, making matters worse. A report in the June 2023 issue of Geophysical Research Letters indicates that depletion of groundwater was a significant contributor to sea level and climate change. The majority of the southwestern United States, northern Australia, most of the South American continent, all of Northern Africa and the Middle East and parts of western Asia are in perennial drought. We need water to live, yet we also need water to make the food we rely on to live; and we never seem to have enough of it.
Why the tradeoff? Why so much waste?
Is there a way to reduce our consumption of water with integrated circuits and AI? 
How could Microchip Technology help conserve our most precious resource?
 
Links from the episode:
 
 
Guests: 
Ross Satchell 
Toby Sinkinson 
 

Episode 006 - Core Independent Peripherals and the battle against Child Asthma

Asthma is a global phenomenon. According to the World Health Organization, Asthma affected an estimated 262 million people in 2019.  In the United States alone, the Centers for Disease Control estimates there are over 4.6 million children under the age of 18 with Asthma.
According to the Global Asthma Report in 2022, Asthma is ""well controlled"" in nearly 2/3rds of adults. That number drops below 45% in children aged 5-14.
While it is the most common chronic disease among children, inhaled medication can control asthma symptoms and allow people with asthma to lead a normal, active life. Not surprisingly, areas of lower to middle income are most affected. What if there was a low-cost, reliable, and portable alternative? What would that do to combat Asthma and other respiratory ailments?
 
How could Microchip Technology help ease the suffering of children around the world?
 
Links from the episode:
Nebulizer Design Solutions | Microchip Technology 
Medical | Microchip Technology 
2023 World Asthma Day - Global Initiative for Asthma - GINA (ginasthma.org) 
 
Guest: Zhang Feng
Zhang Feng | LinkedIn 

Episode 005 - Sensors, Microcontrollers, and Automation in Smart Agriculture

The old parable of the country kid moving to the big city and leaving the farm behind is a timeless yarn of youth, ambition, and Hope. In recent years, that trope has become a reality. The number of farmers in the United States alone has been steadily dropping. The percentage of first-generation farmers is close to 78%. It can be a tough business. Climate cycles are becoming unpredictable and, as in many industries, one just can't find enough workers. That’s where integrated circuits come in. One farmer has the ability in today’s world to augment his efforts through sensors, drones, and microcontrollers to compete and run a farm with what might have required a handful of humans in the past. In fact, only about 1 in 4 young farmers still use the traditional methods passed down over the generations. The reason? Automation and the rise of Machine Learning. 
 
How could Microchip Technology help the farm of the future through automation?
 
Links from the episode:
 
 
Guests: 
Ross Satchell 
Toby Sinkinson 

Episode 004 - Power over Ethernet and Natural Disasters

Severe Storms. Wildfires. Floods. According to Statista, there were 421 natural disaster events recorded worldwide in 2022. Among the most damaging are tropical cyclones, what the World Health Organization would refer to as typhoons or hurricanes. As damaging as the wind can be, the greatest damage to life and property is not from the wind, but from secondary events such as storm surges, flooding, landslides, and tornadoes.
 
To combat and prepare for these events, world leaders and local governments try to anticipate early warning signs in advance of the event using satellite, radar, and other advanced technologies. Despite their best efforts, these disasters happen. When they do, communities are affected, and the damage can be extensive. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in the United States, 2023 was the most expensive year on record for billion-dollar climate disasters.
 
What are these towns and municipalities to do? This is where Smart Cities come in.
 
How could Microchip Technology help bring Smart Cities to life?
 
Links from the episode:
Power over Ethernet | Microchip Technology 
 
Guests: 
Alan Jay Zwiren 

Episode 003 - Sensors, Microcontrollers, and Farm-2-Table in Smart Agriculture

When you sit down to eat your next meal, think about how your food got in front of you. Did you grow it yourself or did you buy it from someone? If the latter, was it from a restaurant or a store? Do you ever wonder how it gets from the farm to your plate?
Whether you are a vegan or a die-hard carnivore, your food comes from a farm somewhere. It needs to be grown, harvested, processed, and transported to a place where it is then prepared and offered for sale. This process can be anywhere from days to months and can come from down the road or across oceans and continents. One thing is for certain, it probably involves one or more integrated circuits along the way. 
 
How could Microchip Technology help bring food from the farm to your table?
 
Links from the episode:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHpe6pvxtag 
 
Guests: 
Ross Satchell 
Toby Sinkinson 

Episode 002 - I3C Protocol and the Rise of Data Centers

Picture an average night at home. You’re sitting on the couch, remote in hand, maybe with a beverage by your side. You use your remote to navigate through the menu of your favorite streaming platform to select an episode of your favorite TV show. You pause to give a command to your smart speaker to shut off the music you were playing before sitting down. As you watch the show, you recognize an actor you like, but you can’t remember where from, so you grab your mobile phone and run a search in your internet browser. Satisfied with the answer, you speak into your smart watch to set a reminder for later to watch a different show starring the same actor. All the while you are lounging with your feet up and feeling quite relaxed; never thinking about the bank of server blades in a data center far away working tirelessly to power the cloud that brings this convenience to the palm of your hand. Our lives are increasingly dependent on the cloud and whether we realize it or not, those data centers are growing and using an amazing amount of energy.
 
How could Microchip Technology help address the growing need for Data Centers in a sustainable way without compromising our new standard of life?
 
Links from the episode:
I3C® | Microchip Technology 
https://www.mipi.org/knowledge-library/webinars/mipi-i3c-week-exploring-world-of-i3c
 
Guests:
Ashish Makthal 
Max Prasad 

Episode 001 - Inductive Position Sensors, Thermocouple ICs, and the perfect Espresso

One of the few things every human on this planet, and every other living thing for that matter, shares is the fact that everything gets 1,440 minutes per day. Our planet makes one rotation on its axis, the sun comes up, the sun goes down and we start the dance all over again. Part of the human experience is how we spend that time.
Multiple sources, including the Mayo Clinic and the World Health Organization, suggest humans need 7-10 hours of sleep. The average workday is also 7-10 hours depending on where you live. The time in between can be consumed with breaks from work or between classes, meals, getting ready for the day and getting ready for bed, not to mention time spent commuting to and from work or school; if you have children, they take most of the rest of your time. With only a few precious minutes per day to ourselves, under the best of circumstances, what would an additional 30 of those minutes mean to us? How could Microchip Technology help to create a time machine to give us this part of our lives back?
 
URLs from the episode:
www.microchip.com/inductive-position-sensors
www.microchip.com/thermocouple-ic 
 
Guest: Dr. Mark Smith
Mark Smith | LinkedIn 

Episode 000 - Welcome to Beyond the Microchip

Welcome to Beyond the Microchip
So much of our daily lives are controlled or influenced by electronics. We rely on GPS to direct us, we hit "brew" on our coffee machines for our mornin' cup of Joe, we wave our hands over a sensor to get running water from a faucet and press a button to open our garage doors. 
But do we really know what's going on inside? Are we aware of the universe of technology and calculations going on right under our nose?
Beyond the Microchip takes you inside the world of Embedded Control technologies to understand how the chips and sensors we can't see impact our lives in dramatic ways. They remind us why we have and embrace technology, to enhance the human experience. 
 
Join us each episode as we look at an aspect of our daily lives that shapes what it means to be human and how we can empower the innovation that enhances that experience through Microchip Technology. Subscribe to Beyond the Microchip wherever you get your podcasts.
 
Visit MCHP.com to learn more!