Highlights this week: 🔋 battery charging fundamentals, 🏭 the equipment multiplier effect, 〜 and designing flex pcbs.
🔗 Last week’s most-clicked link: Classic book on Troubleshooting Analog Circuits.
Startup News 🚀💰:
- Lightship, a startup building electric RV’s, raised a $23M Series A led by Prelude Ventures. Existing and new investors include Obvious Ventures, Congruent Ventures, My Climate Journey, HyperGuap and Alumni Ventures.
- ForSight robotics, a startup building surgical robots for cataract surgery, raised a $55M Series A led by The Adani Group alongside existing investors Eclipse Ventures and Mithril Capital.
- Syrius, a Chinese warehouse-robotics startup, raised a $7M round led by Harvest Capital along with Bytedance.
- The United Arab Emirates launched an $820M fund to boost the domestic space economy, largely in an effort to help diversify its oil-dependent economy.
Interesting Links 🔗:
- Detailed lecture slides on electronics manufacturing → IC through PCB fabrication and assembly, from an MIT manufacturing course.
- Battery charger fundamentals by MPS. Another great reference to keep in the library, readily available.
- Great video introducing plastic injection molding. This Illionis engineering professor’s channel ‘engineer guy’ is full of great explanations and tutorials on all sorts of engineering and manufacturing topics.
- Important lists and links for EE’s and Embedded Systems Engineers. Lists of FPGA development boards, gerber viewing software, ai chip developers, and much more.
- Anduril is aiming to become the sixth ‘defense prime’ in the US, and bring a fresh wave of talent and hardware + software innovation into the defense industry. Great breakdown of Anduril’s business model and focus on software + AI to win the defense market and attract the best tech talent.
- The equipment multiplier effect on the chip shortage: a typical FPGA test tool requires approximately 80 FPGAs to build. However, that tester can then test about 320,000 FPGAs per year – a multiplier effect of ~4,000x. Optical wafer inspection tools require roughly 100 high performance computing (HPC) server chips to manufacture. Their multiplier effect can be ~30,000x and much higher.
- Every Engineer Should Know These 7 ESD Tips. Great writeup from Keysight on how to discharge mats and cables, avoiding pink foam packing material, etc.
- Designing the stiffness out of a flex or rigid/flex circuit. Less layers and vias, rolled-anneal vs electrodeposited copper, mesh vs solid copper for reference planes, and more.
- What $50 Buys You at Huaqiangbei, the World’s Most Fascinating Electronic Market. iPhone repair stencil, microSD cards, Qi chargers, a smartwatch, and more.
One Interesting Picture 📸: james web telescope bus architecture
