⚡️The Analog #45

Sep 13, 2022

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Highlights this week: the engineering of flying fast, pcb etch factor, and the need for robotics in american factories.

👩‍🔧 Featured job: Archer is hiring a Mechanical Design Engineer, Electric Propulsion. See more roles from fellow subscribers and sponsors in the Interesting Jobs section below!

🎪 Featured event: Sonos Roam Teardown. Thurs, Sep 29, 10am PT. Hosted by Instrumental

Update from Mihir:

I’ve spent the last few months working as GM at Summit Interconnect’s Santa Ana PCB manufacturing facility. Summit is the largest privately-held PCB manufacturer in North America, with 8 factories (5 in California alone!) building complex rigid/flex/rigid-flex PCB’s. Huge change from working as an EE & software startup founder… managing a complex P/L, dealing with chemistry/equipment maintenance/material delays/etc daily, and working with 90+ personalities all in a single factory. The best learning experience of my career thus far, with new challenges every day. If anyone wants to chat about manufacturing or running/working-in an American factory, ping me here or on LinkedIn.

Because of the time commitment and responsibilities associated with my new role, TheAnalog.io will move to a bi-weekly cadence. This will allow me to continue curating high-quality content at a pace that several of you have said to prefer.

I want to host a meetup sometime this month or next, either in OC, LA, or SF. If you’d be interested in joining a casual meetup of fellow hardware and manufacturing enthusiasts and professionals, ping me here, on LinkedIn, or on twitter. Tentatively thinking Oct 7 at our Santa Ana facility.

Lastly — you all are amazing and I appreciate you reading and sending links + words of encouragement every week. If you’re enjoying TheAnalog.io, please share the link with your friends and colleagues.

Why YouTube decided to make its own video ASIC. Called Argos, the design achieved a 20-30x increase in transcoding compute performance. Here’s a link to the technical paper YouTube published on the chip.

Siglent SNA5000A 4-Port Vector Network Analyzer Teardown & Experiments. Another great video from EE youtuber Shahriar Shahramian.

Great technical writeup on the etch factor in PCB manufacturing. It can determine how fine a line you can etch, and it can even affect how close together you can have features. For instance, if you wanted to use cupric chloride (etch factor of 3:1) to etch a fine line (3 mils or less), you might not be capable of doing that on panels with thicker copper layers. If you try to do that, you will likely receive inconsistent results throughout your panels.

Notes from Matt Venn’s ASIC office hours -- great links and learnings over the past month. Just really cool to see the open hardware community growing, especially around the complexities of IC design.

American workers need lots and lots of robots. Great piece relating manufacturing, robotic automation, unemployment, and economic growth. Several of the studies the article points to all corroborate the same finding: robot adoption is associated with a substantial increase in employment as well as output. Here’s a link to one of those studies.

DarkAero puts on a masterclass in flight physics and engineering with their latest video on The Engineering Required to Fly Fast. Great analysis with clear explanations, simulation, and more. Enjoyed this one.

Legendary talk given by computer science pioneer, David Patterson. In the 1980s, Mead and Conway democratized chip design and high-level language programming surpassed assembly language programming, which made instruction set advances viable. A new Golden Age for computer architecture is upon us, aided by high-level, domain-specific languages and architectures, open-source ecosystems, and domination by RISC-V.

Academia thinks there may be a major disruption in the EDA industry soon, coupled to the emerging era of domain specific architectures. Designs are becoming extremely heterogeneous. You will see a merger of memory and logic, analog RF, sensors, all those types of things coming together in a single package. Some of those might require very different technologies, different materials, or optical. The computational model of von Neumann is gradually fading, and there will be many alternatives…

To see previous jobs that may still be open, check out our previous issues!

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