Highlights this week: 🎮 ee video games, ⚡️ all things capacitors, and 🐝 drone swarms.
🔗 Last week’s most-clicked link: A list of 300+ RF engineering course files.
Startup News 🚀💰:
- Dusty Robotics, a startup building robot-powered tools for the modern construction workforce, raised a $45M Series B led by Scale Venture Partners.
- Flexxbotics, a startup focused on improving robot utilization and efficiency, raised a $2.9M Series A led by eCoast Angels.
- Salience Labs, a chip startup developing an ultra high-speed multi-chip processor combining photonics and electronics to accelerate exponential advances in AI, raised an $11.5M seed round led by Cambridge Innovation Capital and Oxford Science Enterprises, with Oxford Investment Consultants, former CEO of Dialog Semiconductor Jalal Bagherli, Silicon Catalyst, the Goh Family Office in Singapore and Arm-backed Deeptech Labs.
- reMarkable, the Oslo, Norway-based maker of a simple and slick $299 e-paper tablet of the same name, says that it has passed 1 million devices sold since 2017 and recently raised money at a $1 billion valuation after making revenues of $300 million and operating profits of $31 million in 2021.
- Cogniteam, a low-code AI robotics startup, raised a $5.6M Series A, led by Seabarn Management and Panthera Family Office.
Interesting Links 🔗:
- These hardware engineering games should be a staple in every undergraduate EE/CS program. Turing Complete and NandGame. Essentially building a computer with interesting puzzles and core building blocks for a more intuitive understanding from the logic-block stage.
- The superior electrical characteristics of GaN power devices are phasing out traditional MOSFETs and IGBTs in complex industrial motor control applications. GaN-based power devices can support 10× higher voltage before being damaged, switch at higher frequencies than silicon and provides a low RDS(on) and excellent reverse recovery, and generally come in a smaller die size and reduced footprint.
- Bunnie Huang’s blog is fantastic, especially his post about a supply chain war story involving MEMS resonator. Interesting note: A company called SiTime has been quietly disrupting the crystal industry by building MEMS-based silicon resonators that can outperform quartz crystals in almost every way.
- Passenger with no real flight experience lands the plane after pilot is incapacitated, guided down by an expperienced air traffic controller. Incredible effort, great study in how to successfully communicate a complex instruction set in a high-stress environment.
- This is one of hackerdom's great heroic epics. In a few spare images it captures more about the esthetics and psychology of hacking than all the scholarly volumes on the subject put together. An opposing view to the real programmer likes to program on bare metal view.
- There is some nuance behind the common guideline of voltage-derating capacitors. For ceramics, it has to do with increasing capacitance. For tantalum caps, it has more to do with power-on reliability. Here’s a great presentation on all things capacitors.
- Additive Manufacturing Customizable Machines (AMCM) recently completed the 3D print of the world’s largest aerospike rocket engine. AMCM printed it in copper in their massive 1m build volume machine. The engine stands at 80cm tall.
- Most thermal runaway events in EV’s are associated with battery internal short-circuit. From a regulation perspective, the proposed global technical regulation requires a five-minute advanced warning prior to hazardous conditions caused by a thermal runaway event. The existing methods for fault detection and diagnosis in the battery pack utilize temperature, voltage, and current measurements. For an automotive battery pack with cells connected in parallel, the current measurements for individual cells are not available, and the methods using voltage cannot effectively detect a single cell failure due to a low signal-to-noise ratio. In this paper, a new method is introduced related to cell venting and gas detection.
- A swarm of drones autonomously tracks a human through a dense forest. Cost, agile multicopter control systems, and accurate localization are all drone issues which have been addressed successfully in recent years. Swarms are particularly suited for disaster relief, aiding biological studies, dense air traffic systems, and collaborative transportation. Read the full paper with associated video.
- A book-in-progress about the linux kernel and its insides. Lot to unpack here, very well written. Boot process, initialization, interrupts, memory management, etc.
One Interesting Picture 📸: rocket transport 🚀
