RF Course Notes & Summit Becomes the Largest PCB Manufacturer

Highlights this week: 👨‍💻 rf course notes, 🏭 summit becomes the largest pcb manufacturer, and 🏎 f1 steering wheel sensors.

🔗 Last week’s most-clicked link: How to read a power MOSFET datasheet.

Startup News 🚀💰:

• Royal Circuits, Advanced Assembly, and South Coast Circuits have all been acquired by Summit Interconnect. Summit is now the largest privately held PCB manufacturer in North America with 8 factories and customers across the aerospace and defense, medical device, semiconductor, automotive, and consumer industries. This group acquisition brings quick-turn fab and assembly capabilities, along with an incredible software stack and team to continue building out automation across quoting, planning, and production.
• Vention, a startup building a digital manufacturing automation platform (MAP) empowering high-mix manufacturers to implement industrial automation, raised a $95M Series C led by Georgian, alongside Fidelity Investment Canada ULC, White Star Capital, Bain Capital Ventures, and Bolt Ventures.
• Spectrohm, a startup building next-generation inspection solutions for mail and packages, raised a $2M seed led by HCVC along with Good Growth Capital, RavenTek, J. Hunt Holdings, Dragon Ventures, and Klein Venture Partners.
• Raxium, a startup that spent the past five years innovating in single panel MicroLED display technologies, has been acquired by Google. The terms of the deal are unknown, but Google put a value of $1 billion on Raxium, according to a report from The Information.
• Eureka Robotics, a startup building robotic software and systems to automate tasks that require High Accuracy and High Agility (HAHA), raised $4.25M in a pre-Series A round, led by The University of Tokyo Edge Capital Partners (UTEC) along with Vietnam’s Touchstone Partners and returning investor ATEQ.
• Mashgin, a startup building the world's fastest touchless self-checkout system powered by AI and computer vision, raised a $62.5M Series B at a $1.5B post-money valuation led by NEA along with Matrix Partners.
• RGo Robotics, a startup using artificial perception technology to enables mobile robots to understand complex surroundings and operate autonomously, raised a $20M Series A led by MoreTech Ventures along with Converge and StageOne.
• Southie Autonomy, a startup developing intelligent robotic automation, raised a $2.5M seed round led by BootstrapLabs along with Ocean Azul. Kineo Finance participated in the equity round and is providing an additional $5 million in venture leasing to support Southie’s disruptive robot-as-a-service business model.

Interesting Links 🔗:

• While significant recent progress has been made in text-to-image generation, text-to-shape generation remains a challenging problem due to the unavailability of paired text and shape data at a large scale. This paper presents an effective method for zero-shot text-to-shape generation that circumvents such data scarcity.
• A list of 300+ RF engineering course files. The same professor, James Stiles from the University of Kansas, has published his useful and easy-to-understand microelectronics course material.
• Everything you ever wanted to know about PCB laminates, and then some. Laminate, prepreg, processing, oxide alternatives, etc. Worth a skim through the TOC to see what catches the eye.
• The Hubble recently celebrated 32 years of imaging the sky, which has resulted in over 1.4 million observations. Physicist Casey Handmer combined those observations into a single image to see how much of the sky Hubble had actually captured.
• Last year Tesla’s factory in Fremont, California, produced an average of 8,550 cars a week. That’s more than Toyota Motor Corp.’s juggernaut in Georgetown, Kentucky (8,427), BMW AG’s Spartanburg hub in South Carolina (8,343) or Ford Motor Co.’s iconic truck plant in Dearborn, Michigan (5,564). In a year when auto production around the world was stifled by supply-chain shortages, Tesla expanded its global production by 83% over 2020 levels.
• This tutorial paper on EMC reviews the basic mechanisms by which signal voltages and currents on a printed circuit board produce unintentional radiated emissions. PCB antennas, voltage-driven sources, enclosure resonances, etc.
• Choosing the appropriate capacitor technology, storage inductors, switching frequency and semiconductors, among other factors, is vital for the efficiency of DC/DC switching regulators with relatively high input and output currents. However, with high input and output currents, it is difficult to find a compromise between the efficiency, size, damping and cost of the filter, and the actual performance level. This document will use the example of a 100 W buck-boost DC/DC design to outline the considerations, layout and components necessary to find such a compromise.
• The original Pong video game had no code and was built using hardware circuitry. Here's the original schematic from Atari. Less detail more original.
• A former Apple HR business partner explains how the famously insular company created the Airpods Pro by getting serious about sharing information internally.
• An intro into the many sensors built into an F1 vehicle steering wheel. Instrumentation, pressure, ultrasonic fluid flow, pitot tubes (like a plane), etc.

One Interesting Picture 📸: Atari’s Pong had no code and was built with old fashioned logic.