Highlights this week: 🤖 humanoid robots, 🏭 how not to screw up your manufacturing startup, and 🏓 pong circuit simulator.
🔗 Last week’s most-clicked link: List of the best EE youtube channels.
Startup News 🚀💰:
- VulcanForms, a startup that builds and operates advanced digital manufacturing infrastructure, raised $355M from Eclipse Ventures, Stata Venture Partners, Fontinalis Partners, D1 Capital Partners, Standard Investments, Atlas Innovate, Boston Seed Capital, Industry Ventures, and the Simkins Family.
- Shield AI, a startup making software and hardware for drones and other autonomous aircraft used by military and other government organizations, raised a $165M Series E led by Snowpoint Ventures, Riot Ventures, Disruptive, and Homebrew. The company’s other investors include Point72 Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, Breyer Capital and SVB Capital.
- Glowforge, a laser-cutting hardware startup, raised a $43M Series E led by DFJ Growth.
- Venture Orbital Systems, a French launch-provider (rocket) startup, raised a $10M Series A led by Crédit Mutuel Innovation and Expansion, along with BPI, Comat, Nicomatic, and ADF.
Interesting Links 🔗:
- Dan Bogdanoff and the Keysight team do it again -- great video on how to use an oscilloscope -- all the buttons, acquisition modes, probe calibration, etc.
- How to not f**k up your manufacturing startup. Process, not features. Physics before software. Written by Johnny Bowman, former COO at Edenworks.
- The first million-transistor chip: the engineer’s story. In SF, on Feb. 27, 1989, Intel Corp., Santa Clara, Calif., startled the world of high technology by presenting the first ever 1-million-transistor microprocessor, which was also the company’s first such chip to use a reduced instruction set. Intel’s previous microprocessor, the 80386, has only 275,000 transistors.
- Boston Dynamics' Atlas humanoid robot demonstrates its whole-body athletics, maintaining its balance through a variety of parkour activities.
- Google AI just unveiled Minerva, a language model capable of solving mathematical and scientific questions using step-by-step reasoning. Examples include written-out math problems common to tough engineering entrance exams around the world -- Minerva is able to take that input and output a written, step-by-step response showing all work and a final solution. Incredible.
- A practical guide from Semikron on field-testing of power semiconductor modules. From the correct equipment to passing measurements and example tests for devices ranging from IGBT’s, MOSFET’s, gate drivers, and more.
- Application note from Infineon on EMC and System-ESD Design Guidelines for Board Layout. The paper focuses on the rules, examples, simulations, and measurements for PCB layout, as it relates to emc/esd.
- List of computer museums in Switzerland. Like the Museé Bolo, one of the most important computer history museums in all of Europe.
- A circuit-level interactive simulator of the 1972 Atari game Pong.
One Interesting Picture 📸: 🪔
