Hardware Podcasts

Creating Next-Gen Microcontroller Developer Tools and Equipping the People Who Use Them

Moore's Lobby · 22 Apr 2025 · 49m · Episode 4

AI in practice: 2 real uses of AI described

What this episode covers

Rodger Richey, Vice President of Development Tools and Academic Programs at Microchip Technology, discusses the evolution of embedded development tools over his 30-year tenure. He explains how Microchip shifted its IDE support from NetBeans to VS Code to align with developer habits and details the integration of AI as an assistant for code generation and debugging rather than a replacement. Richey also highlights Microchip's academic initiatives, including virtual internships and hardware labs in India, designed to bridge the gap between theoretical education and practical engineering skills.

AI in practice

Where this conversation describes AI being used to build or deliver a product. Part of the AI in practice tracker.

Engineering & simulationfound 2 bugs in 10-year-old code

A chatbot analyzed existing microcontroller code and identified a logic bug where a function name implied a greater-than operation but the code performed a less-than operation, which had been present for 10 years.

“For instance, we ran a set of code through a chatbot. The function call had greater than in the name of the function call, but the function was actually generating a less than. And so the AI came back and said, hey, your code looks good, but do you know that you're calling a greater than function, but calculating a less than?”

Rodger Richey · Hear it at 15:39

Engineering & simulation

Microchip developers use AI assistants to generate code completions, automatically comment code, and explain strange code snippets, reducing the manual effort required for these tasks.

“Can it help me do auto complete when I'm typing in, you know, uh, a string, you know, a line of code. Um, can it, you know, comment the code? So I don't have to go back and comment code. And what if I see a strange piece of code? I can ask it, hey, what does this code do? And it come back, you know, and it tells you.”

Rodger Richey · Hear it at 15:39

Most relevant to

large enterprises

Topics

Mentioned

Companies
Microchip Technology, ARM, ASU
Products
Lego Mindstorms
Tools
VS Code, NetBeans, Jenkins

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