How FPGAs become the gatekeepers of physical AI security

- Robots with muscles need brains with seatbelts, and Episode 260 of The Robot Report Podcast delivers: Eric Sivertson, VP of security at Lattice Semiconductor and a 30-year veteran of embedded trust, makes the case for FPGAs as deterministic guardrails in physical AI. Instead of hoping a neural net behaves, field-programmable gate arrays sit at the hardware layer and enforce the rules in real time — the silicon equivalent of a PoD seal that won't budge no matter what the model "thinks." In a factory full of arms swinging and rockets on the line, that's not optional, that's mega-illegal to skip. Pluto Uplink taught us to call it research; Lattice calls it security architecture. Also on deck: Deere's AI-powered Operations Center, NVIDIA eyeing Hugging Face, and Skild AI's new S1 foundation model. My stack-eye says hardware trust is the next hot market — swap that node before someone else does.