Highlights this week: 🔥 heating wood to save the planet, 💰 electrical engineering salaries, and 🛫 electric cessna's
🔗 Last week’s most-clicked link: NASA presentation on PCB inspection and QC.
⚡️ Analog Insights: Patents
Startup News 🚀💰:
- Hadrian, a machine-parts startup building automated factories to transform the aerospace supply chain, raised a $90M series A led by Lux Capital and Andreesseen Horowitz.
- Beewise, a startup offering a robotic solution to beehives raiders $80M in a Series C led by Insight Partners.
- BeamUP, a startup using data to lower building design times raised $15M in a seed round led by StageOne Ventures.
- Quantum Machines, a startup specializing in control systems for quantum computers, has acquired the company QDevil, which builds control hardware for quantum systems, for an undisclosed amount.
- AMD announced its intentions to acquire data center optimization startup Pensando for approximately $1.9B.
- Inbolt a company using a combination of AI and 3D vision to generate a digital twin that can be used in any type of manufacturing operation has raised $3.29M in a Seed financing round led by MIG Capital.
- Impulse Space Propulsion, developing in-space transportation services announced it has secured $20M in a seed round led by Founders Fund.
- OmniML, a developer of smaller and faster machine learning models raised $10M in a seed funding round led by GGV.
Interesting Links 🔗:
- The first personal computer, the MITS Altair 8080, was released in 1975 as a $395 kit. The Altair sold a few thousand units that year. Today, more than 300 million personal computers are sold each year!
- Last year, worldwide energy-related carbon dioxide topped 36 billion tons. Mote is building a $100M gasification plant to extract carbon dioxide from wood waste. The wood waste is heated to nearly 1,500 degrees, which releases the carbon dioxide and hydrogen gases. Then, a chemical solvent is used to separate out the carbon dioxide and hydrogen from each other. The carbon dioxide gas is then piped either to an underground storage facility or directly into trucks for transport to concrete producers. The hydrogen gas is piped into specialized trucks for transport to hydrogen fueling. Stations.
- Video on the future of electrical engineering and RF & High speed design from the legend himself, Behzad Razavi. Especially interesting note on “the end of moore’s law” around the 4:05 mark.
- The ultimate hardware engineering job/internship question bank. Everything from opamps to dc-dc converters to current protection circuitry. Good resource/starting point for those looking for new opportunities or just interested in brushing up on the basics.
- Apple introduced their first product, the Apple 1 computer, in 1976. For its display, instead of storing data in RAM, it was stored in a 1024-position shift register. Shift-register memory chips required clock pulses with high current and unusual voltages: from +5 volts to -11 volts. Here’s a detailed look inside one of these early clock driver IC’s.
- A video showing the electromigration effect in a 180 nm CMOS process. After applying a current, the structure gets so hot that the aluminum fuses and flows through the wire. Applying more current begins to affect the silicon.
- Job postings for electrical engineers in the U.S. semiconductor industry grew 78% from 2020 to 2021, more than three times faster than growth for electrical engineers overall. The average salary for electrical engineers in the semiconductor industry is almost $17,000 above average for all electrical engineers.
- A good conversation between experts on pcb manufacturing and design on thermal properties of boards and designing for high current applications. and current-carrying capabilities of pcb’s. Here’s the IPC standard for determining current carrying capacity in PCB design.
- Textron, the multibillion-dollar conglomerate that owns Cessna, has acquired Pipistrel, a small, European electric plane manufacturer. Interesting article with good takes on what this means for both companies and general aviation as a whole.
- Interesting PhD thesis from 2003 on the analog circuit design flow. Curious to hear from readers on what has (or hasn’t) changed over the past two decades.
One Interesting Picture 📸: saves emissions equivalent of > 20,000 cars
