Highlights this week: Indian Casting Factories, Hardware Tech Growth Trends, & the TSMC Story.
- 🔗 Last issue’s most-clicked link: Excellent power electronics blog.
Interesting Links 🔗:
- One of the craziest videos I’ve ever seen in regards to complete lack of health and safety consideration in this Indian casting ‘factory’. Game might be to list all of the safety practices actually ‘in’ place. Beyond the safety note, a somewhat educational video on the casting process.
- Three hardware technology growth trends: onshoring + automation, new robotics use-cases, new pricing models (hardware-as-a-service, akin to hourly operator). Great example of a startup building along all of these trends is Third Wave Automation, which recently raised a $40M Series B this year.
- Taiwan's secret weapon against China - A History of TSMC. Incredible story narrated by John Coogan (funfact: Coogan is a Soylent co-founder).
- Introduction to Electrical Control Panels including PLCs and HMIs. Not much else to describe. Watch the brief video and get a little bit smarter.
- Karl Freund, founder of Cambrian AI Research, published an incredible presentation from his AI HW Summit 2022 talk: The Annual Top 10 List. Interesting closing thoughts around what it takes to go after the AI HW space (hyperniche tech + big funding), the edge markets (hyperniche!), and how big networks (LLM’s) will eat the world (ie NVidia, Graphcore).
- An inside look at Apple Silicon. Over the past two years, Apple has begun transitioning away from Intel chips and successfully launched its first ARM-based SoC (System on Chip) and SiP (System in Package) processors for its Macs. Great overview of the A, S, M, etc. series through the ages.
- So good it’s staying up from last issue: How To Manage And Sell A Company In An Industry And A Country You Don’t Know. Great writeup from the founder of CB Insights, who took over his father’s chemical manufacturing facility upon his father’s early demise.
- US manufacturing is booming. September’s US jobs report showed US manufacturers added another 22,000 workers. Despite the large number of openings as manufacturers continue to ramp up, hiring is still difficult across skillsets. Today less than 10% of private sector jobs are in manufacturing, compared to more than 40% at the end of World War II.
One Interesting Picture 📸: everyone is talking about this book 📖
