New Lego Factory & Switch Mode Power Supplies

Highlights this week: 🏭 new lego factory, 🎛 switch mode power supplies, and ⚡️capacitors

🔗 Last week’s most-clicked link: Why America will Lose Semiconductors.

Startup News 🚀💰:

• Epsilon3, a startup building a suite of project management solutions for spacecraft manufacturing and operations, raised a $15M Series A led by Lux Capital, along with Moore Strategic Ventures, Y Combinator, and MaC Venture Capital.
• Fellow, the 9-year-old coffee-hardware company, raised a $30M Series B led by NextWorld Evergreen.
• Earthblox, a Scottish startup building no-code Earth Observation (EO) cloud based SaaS, raised a £1.5m seed round from Archangels.
• Okapi, a German startup building space traffic management software designed to help satellite operators reduce maneuvers, save fuel and limit downtime, raised a $5.7 million seed round led by Munich Re Ventures along with Dolby Family Ventures, Herius Capital and APEX Ventures.

Interesting Links 🔗:

• Ten years after the Higgs, physicists face the nightmare of finding nothing else. Even optimists say that if the LHC finds nothing new, it will be harder to convince the governments of the world to build the next bigger, more expensive collider to keep the field of particle physics going.
• TheAnalog.io interview with Pete Staples, CEO & Co-Founder of Blue Clover Devices.
• Intuitive application note covering power divider types and functionality.
• The LEGO Group is building a $1B, carbon-neutral factory in Virginia. An onsite solar park will produce enough energy to 100 percent match the factory’s requirements. This is LEGO’s seventh factory in North America.
• Training a pilot is costly, and teaming them up with a wingman for a simulated dogfight is even more expensive. But pitching him up against a state-of-the-art aircraft is almost impossible. Plagued by such budget constraints and a lack of better training for American pilots, the US Air Force has teamed up with Red 6, a company focused on augmented reality systems that aim to revolutionize the way pilots are trained.
• Switch-mode power supply reference manual by On Semiconductor. Arguably more practically informative and easier to read than most power electronics textbooks.
• An entire book on capacitors… ceramic, aluminum, tantalum, equations and all. In annoying linkedin book format.
• TSMC will launch 2nm chipset by 2025 and 3nm chips by this year.
• Incari, the Strate School of Design Bangalore, and Design 1880 plan to retrofit classic cars with modern electronics.
• Texas startup Venus Aerospace is building aircraft that can fly from LA to Tokyo in an hour. Focusing on hypersonic travel, the team is maturing its three main technologies: a zero-emission next-generation rocket engine, innovative aircraft shape and leading-edge cooling, which allows the spaceplane to take off from existing spaceports, using existing infrastructure.
• American semiconductor giants are pressing Congress to pass legislation that would provide $52 billion for their industry, warning that they may otherwise relocate overseas. Building facilities is often 25-50% cheaper in foreign countries than in the United States, largely because of the manufacturing incentives foreign countries offer.

One Interesting Picture 📸: impressive bom optimization 📝