Highlights this week: ⚡️ gate drivers, 🇺🇸 russian use of american semiconductors, 🚀 and apollo flight computers.
🔗 Last week’s most-clicked link: Golden Rules for SMPS PCB Layout
Startup News 🚀💰:
- Revterra Corporation, a Houston-based technology company developing a grid-stabilizing kinetic battery, raised a $6M Series A led by Equinor Ventures and joined by SCF Ventures.
- Amazon acquired iRobot for $1.7B
- Project Solar, an online-only home solar seller, raised a $23M Series A led by Left Lane Capital.
Interesting Links 🔗:
- Video detailing 25 different types of gate drivers. High side, low side, isolation, cross-conduction, etc. Part of a power electronics youtube series by Walid Issa.
- Thin Film Deposition is a vacuum technology for applying coatings of pure materials to the surface of various objects. The key concept behind this type of measurement and control is that an oscillator crystal can be suitably mounted inside the vacuum chamber to receive deposition in real time and be affected by it in a measurable way. Interesting dive into TFD as it relates to semiconductor manufacturing.
- Good intro reading on ASIC’s vs FPGA’s. Similar design flows, + potentially big power savings with FPGA’s vs ASIC’s depending on the application. Lower barriers to entry now with the Open-Source FPGA Association and Matt Venn’s Zero to Asic course.
- Without U.S. chips, Russian missiles and most Russian weapons wouldn’t work. Despite ‘strict sanctions’ on Russia by chipmakers like Infineon, TI, and AMD, many new Russian armaments have been found to contain US chips -- largely repurposed commercial chips taken from more household and industrial appliances. Especially the re-use of commercial FPGA’s (ie those in dishwashers) for missiles.
- Great intro to IGBT’s -- how to select one, switching losses, temperature effects, etc.
- Why Gadgets Die -- nice article from the consumer perspective. Batteries themselve serve as a sort of internal ‘death-clock’ of a few years for most commercial applications, sales models are built around new parts vs recycling/refurbishing old ones, and ‘right-to-repair’ hasn’t quite caught on in the US.
- ifixit did logic board breakdown and chip ID for Apple's MacBook Air with M2 chip (2022). Lots of TI, Renesas, and Nexperia design wins.
- Incredible detail into the Apollo flight computers of the 1970’s. Details on the hardware and firmware architecture, along with the algorithms used for lunar landing descent.
One Interesting Picture 📸: python-control cheat sheet 🐍
