Highlights this week: ↩️ NAND, 🧙♂️ General Magic, and 💰 Startup Funding.
🔗 Last week’s most-clicked link: Simulate IoT Projects in the Browser
Startup News 🚀💰:
- Violet Labs, a startup disrupting the hardware workflow, raised a $4M Seed led by Space Capital along with MaC Venture Capital, Felicis, and V1.VC.
- Aero, a next-generation air travel company, raised a $50M Series B led by Albacore Capital Group, Expa, Keyframe Capital, and Capital One Ventures.
- Hyundai and Boston Dynamics launch AI Institute, investing $400M into a research-first organization that will focus on challenges in the development of robots, spanning fields like machine learning, artificial intelligence, and engineering.
Interesting Links 🔗:
- Step-by-step snubber and clamp design for power supplies. Design of RC snubbers and RCD clamps. The circuit operation, practical considerations and all equations are presented as well as details of how to obtain all the unknown parameters in the equations.
- These guys go deep on NAND. NAND is a market with fierce competition and a relentless march of progress. The number of bits of NAND manufactured and shipped has grown at a pace of 30% to 35% every year, doubling every 2 to 3 years. The initial take would be that this requires a large amount of capital dedicated to new equipment, but the NAND industry has only spent from $15B to $20B on wafer fabrication equipment every year from 2017 to 2022 despite exponential growth.
- Multi-award winning documentary General Magic is the untold tale of how a great vision and epic failure changed the world. The ideas that dominate the tech industry and our day to day lives were born at a secretive Silicon Valley start-up called 'General Magic', which spun out of Apple in 1990 to create the first handheld personal communicator (or "smartphone"). The film combines rare archival footage with powerful honesty from the "Magicians" today, reflecting on the most influential Silicon Valley company no one has ever heard of.
- Join Ian Cutress on a live HotChips watch party. Today is Day 2.
- MIT engineers have devised a new kind of wearable sensor that communicates wirelessly without requiring onboard chips or batteries. The heart of the sensor is an ultrathin, high-quality film of gallium nitride, a material that is known for its piezoelectric properties. The researchers found they could harness gallium nitride’s two-way piezoelectric properties and use the material simultaneously for both sensing and wireless communication.
- Great lecture on getting started in circuit simulation. Using NgSpice and KiCad.
- If you’re a startup or are working with startups, Carta’s ‘Q2 2022 State of Private Markets’ report is a fantastic resource on the current state of the market and fundraising stats and tips in general.
One Interesting Picture 📸: custom power electronics ⚡️
