After more than a year away — we’re back! This time with a bigger team and expanded vision. Exciting times ahead filled with events, partnerships, and prizes — stay tuned!
Highlights this week: 🏭 Domestic semiconductor packaging, 💧 microfluidics manufacturing, and 🧠 AI hardware.
🎤 Featured Interview: Eldrick Millares and James Hu from Illuminant Surgical (YC S22)
Startup News 🚀💰:
- Quilter, an AI startup building EMI-aware PCB design solutions using AI, released a new version adding schematic level functionality to Altium designs.
- AI startups are racing to build wearables. Most entrants in the new AI hardware race work via voice input, foregoing the price and bulk of a large display -- check out Tab and Rewind.
- Volteras, a startup are building connectivity software for EV charging, raised $2.9M in a round led by strategic investor Exor.
- Pebble, an electric vehicle (EV) recreational vehicle (RV) startup, just raised $13.9M from Lightspeed Capital earlier this year. You can get an EVRV for $109k.
Interesting Links 🔗:
- This paper breaks down the US OSAT market (semiconductor packaging), from legacy packaging (flip-chip, qfn, wlp) to advanced -- the major players and where the opportunity lies in the future for the domestic semiconductor industry.
- The US Electrical Grid is the largest interconnected machine on Earth with over 500,000 miles of high-voltage transmission lines. The 2022 State of Reliability report from NERC is a goldmine of informa`tion on the grid, immediate risks, and long-term safety measures. Also check out Brian Potter’s deep-dive on the subject (offshore wind farms can take 10 years to permit, due to the number of agencies and the number of potential NEPA reviews involved… bureaucracy).
- Instrumental wants you to share your manufacturing ‘horror story’ (to win big!). We can think of a few, especially in the PCB world… everything from internal shorts found at final test to hole-wall plating thickness being too thin and caught too late.
- Senior design capstone project review on Digi-Key, where a Purdue undergrad walks through his project, the key hardware and firmware issues, and how to design with reliability in mind (ie over-charge, reverse polarity, etc).
- Microfluidic technologies scale down complicated laboratory processes into single devices that are often smaller than a credit card. What PCB’s are to electronics, microfluidics ‘chips’ are to liquid droplets. Parallel fluidics is spearheading this miniaturization and iterative engineering process in life sciences with some incredible manufacturing breakthroughs -- see an example of designing a microfluidics chip at <100um scale (that’s ~3mil for the EE’s).
- No doubt we have all seen the now historic Vegas Sphere, but have you thought about the requisite audiovisual entertainment systems inside it? The sphere boasts the largest spherical LED screen in the world. The interior display is 160,000 sqft and the exterior is 580,000 sqft. At 16Kx16K the interior screen is one of the world's highest resolution displays. The sound system even has 167,000 amplification channels to shake the 10,000 haptic seats.
One Interesting Picture 📸: A demonstration of using flaps with a forward control system to counteract aviation turbulence.
