View this email in your browser
Highlights this week: 🎤 an interview with Elecia White, 🛰 beaming solar energy down from space, and ⚡️ a new chiplet standard.
🔗 Last week’s most-clicked link: The basics of digital LDO’s.
⚡️ Analog Interviews: Elecia White (Logical Elegance, Embedded.fm, and Making Embedded Systems).
Startup News 🚀💰:
- Starship Technologies, the creator of self-driving delivery vehicles, picked up $42 million in an all-equity Series B round co-led by NordicNinja, and Taavet+Sten.
- Veev, a real estate developer turned tech-enabled homebuilder, raised $400 million a Series D led by Bond.
- OPT Industries, a company 3D printing a novel nasal swab, raised $15 million in a Series A round led by Northpond Ventures.
- Volocopter, the developer of a taxi-style electric VTOL aircraft, raised $170 million in a Series E led by WP Investment.
- Luminous, the company that develops semiconductors that uses light to send data raised $105 million in a Series A from many investors including Bill Gates.
Interesting Links 🔗:
- Cadence Design Systems might be the best business most people have never heard of (well, not this readership!). Really great podcast talking about the history and business of Cadence, the semiconductor and EDA industries at large, and how Cadence has managed to thrive in recent years with a stock price increase of nearly 500%.
- The development of commercial launch systems has substantially reduced the cost of space launch. NASA’s space shuttle had a cost of about $1.5 billion to launch 27,500 kg to Low Earth Orbit (LEO), $54,500/kg. SpaceX’s Falcon 9 now advertises a cost of $62 million to launch 22,800 kg to LEO, $2,720/kg. Commercial launch has reduced the cost to LEO by a factor of 20.
- UCIe 1.0. A chiplet is a physically realized and tested (hardened) IP with a standard communication interface manufactured in a silicon wafer to reduce cost. With chiplets, the goal is to reduce product development times and costs by integrating pre-developed dies in an IC package. There is now a standardized connection between chiplets that will make it much easier for smaller companies to take advantage of chiplet-based designs or for one company to include another company's silicon in its own products.
- Ukraine is home to half of the world's neon gas, which is critical for manufacturing semiconductor chips. 80-90% of US neon imports come from Ukraine. Ukraine’s neon industry was built to take advantage of the gases produced as byproducts of Russian steel manufacturing, with one company in particular handling all of it -- Cryoin.
- There are two main forms of bare chip technology for IC’s: Chip-On-Board and Flip Chip. COB is a simple bare die attach technology, but its packaging density is far less than that of TAB (IC onto flex) and Flip Chip.
- ByteDance, parent company to TikTok and VR headset creators Pico Interactive, announced at MWC 2022 that it’s partnering with Qualcomm. ByteDance said that Pico devices will be powered by Snapdragon Spaces XR, Qualcomm’s developer platform that allows creators to make 3D applications for smartphone-tethered AR glasses.
- The European Space Agency is reviewing proposals for space-based solar power. This means capturing high-intensity solar energy with satellites in space and beaming it down to earth. Major challenges include everything from the development and deployment of very large structures to capture and store this solar energy, the obvious challenge of beaming energy back down to earth, and on-board power regulation -- among many more.
- Great study by Instrumental on the Engineering Efficiency Crisis as it relates to NPI programs. The most important leadership priorities for NPI teams included on-time launch and hitting a BOM cost target, but nearly 43% of surveyed projects were delayed from their initial ship date. This study uncovers and explains that gap.
- Harsh-environment and high-reliability engineering often go hand-in-hand. For industries like aerospace and defense, the stakes are even higher. Here’s a good webinar from Royal Circuits talking about designing high-reliability PCB’s.
One Interesting Picture 📸: IC Packaging 📦
