Highlights this week: Factory Gameplay 👾 Semiconductor Startups 🏎 Motor Windings 🌪
📝 Featured Article: How Aerospace Team Graz uses PartsBox for their aerospace components management.
🎤 Featured Interview: This week we spoke with Samer Aldhaher, Power Electronics Engineer.
Interesting Links 🏭
[engineering]: Fuelling semiconductor innovation and entrepreneurship with Lip-Bu Tan, former CEO of Cadence Design Systems. Lip-Bu has invested in over 190 companies pre-IPO with $5B AUM at his firm Walden International. He says the top three new applications for custom silicon are: eCommerce (recommendation engines), streaming, and ADAS.
[manufacturing]: A paper looked at construction costs for hundreds of nuclear reactors built in the US, France, Canada, Japan, German, India, and South Korea between 1960 and 2010. The paper’s findings suggest that there is no inherent cost escalation trend associated with nuclear technology, despite costs in the US spiraling out of control since the 80s. South Korea actually drove nuclear costs down, at a rate similar to that of solar. For those looking for a primer on nuclear, check out this article outlining the design and deployment of a special-topics course entitled “NE290: Nuclear History, Politics, and Futures”.
[engineering]: Factorio is a game in which you build and maintain factories. In development since 2012 and released in 2021, Factorio allows players to mine resources, research technologies, build infrastructure, automate production and fight enemies. Over 3.5M people have bought the game, and we are certainly included in that figure.They even have a cool circuit network scheme.
[manufacturing]: IC packaging technology is continuing to miniaturize. Wafer-level chip scale packaging (WLCSP) allows the IC package to be practically the same size as the silicon itself. Check out this application note explaining the mfg process of WLCSP.
[engineering]: The year’s first edition of the Analog Design Journal from Texas Instruments is out. Particularly interesting article on fixed-frequency DCS control topology for applications that require both a fast transient response and have specific noise or frequency requirements. Browse the entire archive going back to 1999 here.
[manufacturing]: Some motor fabrication fundamentals. Bar windings have a lower resistance and material cost, but are more difficult to manufacture than the traditional stranded winding motor. Another consideration is the higher ac resistance of the bar-wound motor due to increased skin effect. However, reducing the bar size sufficiently can provide an advantage over the right speed range compared to stranded windings (Model Y uses 2mm bars).
[manufacturing]: The MV-1 embedded microvalve from Parallel Fluidics is the industry’s first chip-embeddable control valve (available in bulk quantities, today). Rated to operate one million cycles, this valve is effectively the ‘transistor’ of the microfluidics world. It will be interesting to see what systems this valve makes its way into.
[engineering]: Training a large language model like GPT-3 is estimated to use just under 1,300 MWh of electricity; about as much power as consumed annually by 130 US homes. To put that in context, streaming an hour of Netflix requires around 0.8 kWh of electricity. That means you’d have to watch 1,625,000 hours to consume the same amount of power it takes to train GPT-3. In a test of 88 different AI models prompted 1000 times across text classification, text generation, and image generation, the models consumed 2Wh, 47Wh, and 2907Wh of energy respectively. Compared to the average energy consumed from streaming one hour of video, the average text generation prompt is the equivalent of 0.2s of video.
Startup News 🚀💰:
Valispace was acquired by Altium for ~$20M (announced this morning). See Altium’s latest investor presentation for more detail on acquisitions and the business in general as they join Renesas in their own $9B acquisition.
Dust Photonics raised a $24M Series B extension for its Carmen family of silicon photonics transceivers. The company’s technology allows the PCB hosting a chip to be fully immersed in coolant without any affect to these optics. Sienna Venture Capital, Greenfield Partners, Atreides Management, invested among others.
K2 Space raised $50M in funding from existing investors including Altimeter Capital. The company plans to use the funding to add a 150k sqft mass production facility for its ‘satellite buses’ which can deposit satellites at a further range from the launch vehicles trajectory.
Samphire Neuroscience raised a $2.3M pre-seed round for its neurotech wearable which uses low transcranial currents to reduce sensitivity and block pain for a number of women’s health conditions. Seaside Ventures, FIRSTPICK, CVX, and AfterWork invested.
NavierAI launched this week. Both founders are currently participating in YC’s Winter batch. The company plans to use machine learning to inform CFD simulation runs about past results allowing it to avoid unnecessary calculations, thereby increasing the speed of the simulation to be much faster (maybe 1000x).
Varda’s capsule demonstrating in-space manufacturing of the drug Ritonavir landed in Utah earlier last week.