Highlights this week: 🚀 horse to rocket pipeline, 🏭 the state of mass production, 👨💻 and pcb design guidelines.
🔗 Last week’s most-clicked link: MIT lecture slides on electronics manufacturing.
Startup News 🚀💰:
- The Department of Energy is reviving a $2.5B GM + LG joint venture used to help finance the construction of new lithium-ion battery cell manufacturing facilities. GM and LG have plans to invest more than $7 billion to jointly build three battery plants. Production at the Ohio factory is expected to begin in August. In Tennessee, production is scheduled for late 2023 and in Michigan for 2024.
- Rad Golf, a golf-tech startup, raised a $1M seed.
- Atlantic Quantum, a startup developing scalable quantum computers, raised a $9M seed led by The Engine, Thomas Tull, Glasswing Ventures, Future Labs Capital, and E14.
- IQM, a European quantum computing leader, raised a $128M Series A2 led by World Fund.
Interesting Links 🔗:
- A popular theory is that the size of a horse’s butt in Ancient Rome determined the size of NASA’s shuttle rocket boosters. Rocket boosters were shipped across the country via rail. The standard rail gauge in America is 4ft 8.5in, with tunnels along the route being not much wider. The track sizes were set in the mid 1800’s based on English building techniques, which was largely based on Roman engineering… which was influenced by chariots (vs cars). The width of two horses? ~4ft 8.5in. Interesting way to think about path dependence and technological lock-in.
- Fun hexagonal puzzle. Rotate the tiles so that all pipes are connected with no loops.
- The Embedded Rules of Thumb -- 5% of functions consume 80% of debugging time. Use of hardware accelerators to offload CPU-based algorithms can reduce power requirements. Eliminate globals! Plus a lot more, including links to further reading.
- The 2022 State of Mass Production report from Instrumental. Top three concerns: adapting to supply chain disruptions, scaling for increased demand, and meeting cost reduction goals.
- “Ultimate electronics book” -- not complete, but great fundamentals with interactive circuit simulation built in for easy understanding.
- Video going into detail on a few different PCB designs, with special emphasis on flex pcbs. Choosing different types of stiffeners (steel, aluminum), assembly, etc.
- Super in-depth presentation on PCB design from Daniel Beeker, FAE at Freescale Semi/NXP. Component placement, transmission line routing, EMC considerations and testing, use of planes, and much more.
- MOSFET’s are voltage-controlled devices, so their turn-on operation should be relatively trivial -- just introduce a signal greater than the threshold voltage, and it’s on… it’s a bit more nuanced than that, namely it is the gate voltage at which the drain current crosses a particular threshold (uA). Read Vishay’s paper on understanding the turn-on process for power mosfets.
- Samsung proposes 11 Texas semiconductor plants worth $191B. This comes after Samsung’s upcoming $17B facility in Taylor, Texas (expected to be fully operational 2024).
One Interesting Picture 📸: james web telescope bus architecture
