Highlights this week: Magnetic Gear Boxes ⚙️ Ingesting Electronics End-to-End 🍽️ Deep Dive on Flip Flop Timing ⏰
📝 Featured Article: Driving Operational Efficiencies, with Sean Patterson at Summit Interconnect.
Interesting Links 🏭
[engineering]: A comprehensive overview of the end-to-end design of edible electronics. This review article from Nature discusses high level system topologies for both essential (sensors, actuators, IC’s, communication, power, packaging) and non-essential (localization, locomotion) systems which are necessary to design a safe, functional device that can transit the gastrointestinal system.
[manufacturing]: John Walker, co-founder of Autodesk passed away recently. He was President & Chairman of Autodesk when it went public in 1985, growing it to 255 employees and $40M in revenue before returning to programming in 1986, eventually moving to Autdodesk’s Switzerland office. One gem alongside John’s book, the Autodesk File, is the original IPO roadshow deck from 1985, which were physical slides made using AutoCAD. John maintained an extensive personal website, Fourmilab, and wrote one other book, the Hacker’s Diet.
[engineering]: The Bendix CADC is an analog computer used by fighter planes in the 1950s. It computed airspeed, Mach number, and other important parameters. Ken Shirriff reverse-engineered how it performed these calculations with tiny gears, differentials, and cams.
[manufacturing]: A walkaround of Geminis newest CNC lathe from Doug Schulte. Rated for 88 ton parts and has an enormous 80 part tool changer. Able to accommodate parts measuring up to 8m this is one massive lathe. Check out the factory that builds the machine.
[engineering]: Tom Stanton used a copper disk rotor with a permanent magnet stator to design an eddy current gearbox for a bicycle. Using N54 magnets it is possible to build a working system, where the cyclist must pedal faster than the relative wheel motion to create torque, and then stop pedaling for a full brake. What makes this impractical are the eddy current losses that waste energy as heat. With that being said, eddy current brakes do have wider applications.
[engineering]: Mark Thoren dives deep on flip flop timing, and goes through his favorite engineering interview question. The end of the talk is actually quite complex and he demonstrates a metastable D flip flop circuit caused by the clock frequency being too fast for the propagation delays of the system.
[engineering]: Open Magnetics is a free and open source platform for magnetics design and simulation. With a comprehensive roadmap and a number of different tools such as this one for finding an off-the-shelf magnetic core for your design specifications. Project founder Alfonso Maritnez also runs an educational blog about magnetics fundamentals.
[engineering]: A great lab course from Brian Douglas with Matlab. This five part series walks you through the control system design of a small quadcopter drone. Part 2 sketches out the system control diagram in a way that would be useful for any interview.
Startup News 🚀💰:
Quilter raised a $10M Series A for their AI PCB design solution that takes into account real-word physics as well as end-to-end PCB layout including placement, routing, stackup, etc. Benchmark led the round with Coatue and existing investors participating.
Daedalus is a startup which uses AI to configure off-the-shelf manufacturing equipment to produce bespoke, high-precision parts right away from a CAD model. The company raised a $21M Series A this week as production ramps up at its 50k sqft facility in Karlsruhe, Germany. The company wants to have a fully autonomous factory operating in Karlsruhe by 2025. NGP Capital led the investment, Khosla Ventures and Addition participated.
Ampersand raised a $12.5M Seed round to develop solid state transformer technology. Initial systems are 2, 4, and 6MW configured as cabinet racks of transformers. It is not a monolithic device like conventional transformers. Additionally cooling requirements are lower, meaning the units require less space. Initially Ampersand is targeting EV chargers but small renewable generating facilities would also be a good fit. Xora Innovation and Material Impact co-led.
Thea Energy raised a $20M Series A lead by Prelude Ventures. The company is developing a planar coil stellarator fusion reactor design that it hopes to commercialize in 10 years. The magnets used in Thea’s design are small enough to be tested at lab scale, meaning they can avoid costly infrastructure iteration cycles.
Larq, which was famously funded through Shark Tank, and expected $30M in revenue in 2022, was acquired by category-leader Brita.
Transmutex raised an $11.5M Series A led by Steel Atlas and Union Square Ventures. It is a new topology for power generation, with a particle accelerator driving a subcritical nuclear fuel mass.