Top EE YouTube Channels & PCB Plating Process

Highlights this week: 🎥 top ee youtube channels, 🏭 pcb plating process, and 🧠 solving big problems.

🔗 Last week’s most-clicked link: Switch-mode power supply reference manual from On Semiconductor.

Startup News 🚀💰:

• Audience, a robot-powered outbound marketing (letter writing) startup, raised a $10M Series A led by Next Coast Ventures.
• Lightbits Labs, a startup building solutions that separate storage and compute without touching the network, raised a $42M Series B led by Atreides Management with participation from JPMorgan, Valor Equity Partners, OG Tech and others.
• LiveView Technologies, a manufacturer of intelligent safety and security ecosystems, raised a $50M Series B led by Sorenson Capital with participation from The Larry H. Miller Group, Lead Edge Capital, Pelion Venture Partners.
• Pitch deck breakdown for WayRay’s successful $80M Series C raise. AR hardware startup.

Interesting Links 🔗:

• A great overview of plating and finish processes in PCB manufacturing. Electroplating, electroless, immersion, etc.
• A list of the best EE youtube channels. Surprised to not find the hilarious/informative videos from Mark Hughes on there -- find those on Advanced Assembly’s youtube channel.
• TheAnalog.io interview with Kyle Dumont, CTO & Co-Founder of AllSpice.
• Should the UK have a strategy for semiconductors? Policy piece on the global and UK semiconductor industries, and the UK’s semiconductor manufacturing history.
• Deloitte published a study that provides a view into business transformation in the semiconductor ecosystem. The study ranks integrated ai, edge computing, and 5G as the top three trends driving business transformations -- well above IC configurations.
• Cerebras trained a 20 billion parameter AI model on a single system -- its Wafer Scale Engine 2 chip (the world's largest chip). The WSE-2 has 2.6 trillion transistors. Built on TSMC 7nm, it has 850,000 'AI optimized' cores, 40GB of on-chip SRAM memory, 20 petabytes of memory bandwidth, and 220 petabits of aggregate fabric bandwidth.
• An EE professor took the concept of complex impedance into his own hands and built an animation model that can be run directly from this link.
• How to solve big problems. This study found that SpaceX’s platform strategy was 10X cheaper and 2X faster than NASA’s bespoke strategy when compared over 200+ missions. Moreover, SpaceX’s platform strategy was financially less risky, virtually eliminating cost overruns.
• A hi-tech village is working to solve America’s chip shortage -- specifically, Albany (NY). As recently as 1990, the U.S. held 37 percent of the world’s semiconductor manufacturing capacity, according to the Semiconductor Industry Association. That’s now down to 12 percent even as some of the most sophisticated processors continue to be designed by U.S. companies. Meanwhile, Asia has become the dominant producer—with one Taiwanese company in particular manufacturing over 90 percent of the world’s advanced microchips.

One Interesting Picture 📸: this is a render 🤯