Highlights this week: Iron-air battery research 🔋 Space-based solar power 🌻Microelectrode impedance characteristics 🔬
📝 Featured Article: PCB fabrication Technology Insights from Summit Interconnect. A one-stop in explaining the pros/cons of various PCB add-on services.
Interesting Links 🏭
[engineering]: A useful article from Qorvo by Mike Engelhardt detailing the modeling parameters of an op amp. It discusses the common ‘RRO’ model of the opamp and how this affects performance over full bandwidth.
[engineering]: The MIT Radio Society, in conjunction with the MIT UHF Repeater Association, the MIT Electronics Research Society, and the Harvard Wireless Club, sponsors a Swapfest on the third Sunday of each month, April through October. This is a place to buy, sell, and swap amateur radio, electronic, and computer equipment. Hams and non-hams alike are welcome.
[manufacturing]: A directory of open-source PocketQube satellite designs. PocketQubes are a class of satellite defined by a 5x5x5cm form factor with a 250g weight limit. Notable mentions are the Carnegie Mellon Pycubed mini and $50 satellite from Morehead University. Alba Orbital (author) is the leading provider of PocketQube satellite rideshare services, having delivered 41 satellites to orbit to date with launch partners such as SpaceX and Rocket Lab.
[engineering]: A set of lecture notes from Mathias Magdowski at OVG University in Germany on EMC measurement methodologies for fast and precise measurements. There’s a funny meme on one slide suggesting that a reverberation chamber is just a larger microwave oven.
[manufacturing]: A very thorough analysis of the 3D printing/additive industry by Samo Burja of the Bismarck Brief. In one example, high-end titanium alloy powder for printers has been shown to cost up to $500 per kilogram. In contrast, titanium alloy rods can be bought from Alibaba for $25 per kilogram, a twenty-fold difference. Outside of metal printing, even bioprinting is an interesting (yet currently unprofitable) endeavor which the article also goes on to discuss.
[manufacturing]: A primer on iron-air battery research from MIT spin-out, Form Energy. This new cell chemistry uses iron electrodes which absorb oxygen while charging, creating rust. During discharge however the batteries release the oxygen and energy back, allowing them to efficiently store energy for a couple days. Construction of Form Energy’s manufacturing facility is ongoing.
[engineering]: NASA has released a new report on space-based solar power. Turns out, solar arrays which collect solar energy in GEO and transmit back to Earth could become commercially viable as soon as 2050. Two topologies were evaluated: Innovative Heliostat Swarm (IHS) and Mature Planar Array (MPA). The former uses a parabolic mirror to concentrate energy towards the surface, and the latter causes a planar projection of solar rays. The report emphasizes the need to overcome significant challenges such as assembling and maintaining large systems in orbit, enabling autonomous operation, and developing efficient power-beaming to transmit energy to Earth. Despite the potential benefits of SBSP, the report indicates that emissions from space-based solar power could be similar to those from terrestrial alternative power sources.
[engineering]: The development of microelectrode arrays has revolutionized the possibilities of studying the brain in action. The introduction of microfabrication techniques has revolutionized the in vivo recording of neuronal activity and introduced high-density, multi-electrode arrays that increase the spatial resolution of recordings and the number of neurons that can be simultaneously recorded. Scientists at the University of Zurich have shown that the recording quality is systematically related to electrode impedance.
[engineering]: Researchers at Cornell have developed a set of acoustic smart glasses which use sonar transducers to perform eye-tracking. The system uses one speaker and four microphones per-eye to achieve tracking within 3.6deg of accuracy, which is comparable to the high-end of that same specification for webcam based systems. The same group also developed a system to track speech by using acoustic-sensing and AI to continuously recognize up to 31 unvocalized commands, based on lip and mouth movements.
Startup News 🚀💰:
SpaceFields raised an $800k Seed round. The startup is developing solid-fuel using aerospike engine designs. Based in Bengaluru, India, HVB 88 Angels invested.
Extropic is building a full-stack hardware platform to harness matter's natural fluctuations as a computational resource for Generative AI. This is basically a way to bake probabilistic models into hardware and then run inference on them using random fluctuations. Theoretically this means much faster inference for things like PGMs. The company claims this will enable AI accelerators that are many orders of magnitude faster and more energy efficient than digital processors (CPUs/GPUs/TPUs/FPGAs).
Kurs Orbital has raised $4M in Venture funding. The company is developing a satellite servicing module which can be used to ‘dock’ to arbitrary satellites to perform maintenance or de-orbiting operations. OTB Ventures led with Credo Ventures and Galaxia participating.
Apex Space has broken a small satellite ‘clean-sheet’ design record bringing a satellite from paper to orbit in under one year. Their satellite recently launched aboard a SpaceX Falcon rocket last week.
Silogy, a startup developing a chip design verification suite in the YCW24 batch, has launched.