EW BrightSparks 2023 profile: James Pickford, Siemens EDA

Now in its sixth year of awards, EW BrightSparks sees Electronics Weekly highlight and celebrate some of the brightest and most talented young engineers in the UK today.

Here, in our series on the latest EW BrightSparks of 2023, we profile James Pickford, a Software Intern at Siemens EDA.

Achievements

James joined the Tessent Embedded Analytics team, at Siemens EDA, as an intern software engineer, his nominator told us – he has been working extensively on a hardware based cyber security solution for connected vehicles. We learned that he has been successfully working on everything from the initial security attach profiles, through to the embedded software required to drive the hardware components.

This Embedded software was C-based and compiled onto an embedded ARM processor, running along side the target hardware, on a Xilinx FPGA.

As well as the Embedded software component, James also wrote some of the application software running on a PC, using Python, to communicate to the embedded code on chip.

Also for ease of use, James created a touch screen GUI, to enable trade show attendees able to easily interact with the system on a show floor.

With a comprehensive prototype demonstrator created, James was also a key part of the team that took this demonstrator out to various European conferences to promote and present the technology. Events included “Siemens EDA User2User Conference, Munich” , “IoT World Congress, Barcelona”, “AESIN Automotive Conference, UK”.

Also, we learned, to further drive credibility within the automotive community James, wrote a technical paper based on his research and development. And he was able to get this published by the SAE (Society of Automobile Engineers) and this was then showcased at the SAE World Congress in Detroit.

His strengths are recognised within his company. For example, for internal communications, James was asked to present his work and research on ‘hardware-based cyber security for connected vehicles’ (which considered threat categories and the use of an embedded security subsystem) to the Siemens internal Cyber Security product team.

His nominator summarised his impact as follows:

“James is an aspiring software engineer, who through his internship has developed an active interest in vehicle Safety and Security, along with an active interest in AI.

Alongside his software abilities, James has firsts class communication and presentation skills being able to communicate complex engineering problems and solutions to a wide audience.”

Community

James has published with SAE.org and he is also an active member of GAAC. This is made up from significant industry partners such as: Siemens, BMW, Imec, Infineon, Intel, Mclaren, Audi, Voltswagen, Porsche Consulting, Spaceforge, ST Microelectroncs and Teradyne.

James has been very involved with the group and has been an important contributor we learned from his nominator.

For example, he was a major contributor to a paper concerning hardware threats to automotive systems.

James has also finished a second paper, which has been submitted to ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) for publication, and he is working on a white paper to be published by Association for Computing Machinery.