Highlights this week: 🛠️ EE lab tools 📝 RF course notes 🔬 and graphene-doped super-copper
📝 Featured Article: Allspice’s Git for Hardware Guide.
Interesting Links 🔗:
- A quick read overviewing various lab tools for firmware developers. Covering logic analyzers, measuring power consumption, bypassing a PCB to flash, firmware debugging, and using an SDR for situations where a radio is involved. The PINECIL ‘smart soldering iron’ is particularly interesting.
- Detailed lecture slides on electronics manufacturing. IC through PCB fabrication and assembly, from an MIT manufacturing course. Interesting: resistors are manufactured by sputtering a thin-film resistive layer (vacuum deposition) onto a ceramic base. The resistance value is established by photolithography and wet etching/laser trimming.
- Pacific Northwest National Laboratory has demonstrated an 11% decrease in the temperature coefficient of resistance by adding a small amount of graphene to copper. This could permit motors to run at higher temperatures where the electrical conductivity of its wires would normally drop off.
- Fast Airplanes and Tiny Transistors. The evolution of commercial airplane manufacturing shares intriguing parallels to that of semiconductor manufacturing. This three part essay will articulate some of the relevant lessons from the aviation industry. Speed/density, capital intensity, unit economics, and east/west cultural divide.
- Can CMOS be replaced for memory and logic applications? Although scaling of CMOS continues, the benefits are reduced as we approach the limits of the physics for these devices. This chapter from the 2023 IEEE Heterogeneous Integration Roadmap goes deep into several replacement candidates, including nanoscale vacuum electronics, graphene materials, and ferroelectric memory – including their reliability and manufacturing challenges.
- A list of 300+ RF engineering course files. The same professor, James Stiles from the University of Kansas, has also published his easy-to-understand microelectronics course material.
- Researchers at Apple have published a paper outlining how to operate a LLM with significantly fewer memory resources. Researchers used a ‘windowing’ technique which bundles data together more efficiently allowing it to be chunked and loaded faster. A second overview of the paper explaining key concepts here.
- ‘Day-in-the-life’ video of an EE PhD student (now a postdoc at NASA JPL). His channel is pretty interesting for EE’s in general (especially students).
Startup News 🚀💰:
- Omnisight has raised $1.5 million in funding for an AI enabled radar sensor that can report events such as collisions in real-time. Terms undisclosed.
- Sunflower Labs has raised $1.5M in convertible note financing for its commercial drone security system. The commercial market was a pivot from an earlier residential focus following their Series A earlier this year.
- Braces on Demand has raised a $1.5M Series A for a 3D printer that can fabricate a patient's braces within a clinician's office. Terms undisclosed.
- Air Space Intelligence has raised $300 million in new fundraising, led by a16z.
- Xiant Technologies raised a $2.85M Series B from undisclosed investors for its patented pulsed alternating wavelengths lighting systems. The devices are designed for both personal health and agricultural applications.
Atari schematics for the original PONG video game.
