⚡️The Analog #68
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Highlights this week: Antique Power Electronics 📠 Major EDA Acquisitions💰Putnam Winners and Scores 🧮
📝 Featured Article: From Summit Interconnect; what’s new in IPC 6012 Revision F.
👩🔧 Featured job: Yank Technologies is looking for a power electronics engineer.
🎪 Featured event: Venture Engine will be hosting the Manufacturing Innovation Showcase on 2/29 in Chicago.
Interesting Links 🏭
[engineering]: Radio antennas and how they operate. Dipoles, directional gain, feed lines, etc. Great article from the ARRL (ham radio). For example, a dipole antenna has limitations. It is good for just one amateur band when it is fed with coaxial cable. It may cover only a part of an amateur band before a mismatch occurs, a phenomenon known as "antenna bandwidth." Multiband dipoles minimize this undesirable condition by tuning the feedline to deal with limited bandwidth and operating on many amateur bands with a single dipole. Plenty of other great elementary electronics links from the ham radio association here.
[engineering]: An overview of pre-thyristor power electronics. This paper explains the working principles of some key power switching devices from the first half of the twentieth century such as controlled mercury-arc rectifiers, thyratrons, and ignitrons. Then a variety of early AC drives are discussed including the classic cyclotron, a type of particle accelerator invented at Berkeley in 1929.
[engineering]: The Putnam Competition is an annual mathematics competition for undergraduate college students in the United States and Canada. Nearly all of the winners are from MIT. Here’s a sample set of problems and solutions from the 2019 exam (for context, the median score is 1 out of 120).
[engineering]: A tantalizing screen recording of how to accurately model a toothbrush in Solidworks. Are your 3D modeling skills strong enough to sketch an object on your desk?
[engineering]: Tenstorrent CEO Jim Keller replies to Sam Altman’s plan for $7T AI chips “I can do it for less than $1T”. Tenstorrent is currently on a roadmap to create a 3nm AI chiplet. Altman’s plan for a $5-7T AI chip would be several times larger than the current chip market size.
[manufacturing]: The fully modular Framework 16 laptop has been released and received a perfect score of 10 from iFixit during their teardown. Adamantly designed for repairability Framework works with a manufacturing partner Compal in Taiwan. Linus Tech Tips toured their facility a few months ago. Very interesting, the DIY version of the laptop is fully assembled and then disassembled to ensure users can do it.
[manufacturing]: Magnetics essentials from Dr. Ray Ridley where he discusses design of a 15W flyback power supply for a 10kA circuit breaker. Using a remarkable Excel interface Dr. Ridley is able to design a power supply and then simulate it according to various transformers which he characterized.
[engineering]: Why Synopsys bought Ansys for $35B. A good overview of the challenges in the semiconductor design market where system analysis is now critical for chip technology, but at the same time system analysis software is becoming very competitive with multiple entrants. Thus we are seeing larger software firms buy smaller ones (Siemens and Cadence have also been on aggressive M&A trends).
[engineering]: A microfluidic electrohydrodynamic pump that can control the temperature for the person wearing it. The device uses the coulomb force to move an ionic fluid which acts as a coolant. The entire system is soft and flexible meaning it could be embedded within clothing as a wearable.
Startup News 🚀💰:
Altium was acquired by Renesas for ~$6B USD. Altium previously rejected a $3.9 billion takeover bid by Autodesk in 2021. Lots of interesting products and features coming out of Altium, especially with their focus on Altimade.. wonder how this changes/improves with Renesas. Great podcast on the acquisition by The Amp Hour.
Big weekend in ‘The Gundo’! The defense tech hackathon was in full-swing with all of the usual suspects. It’s pretty exciting to see a cult (in the positive Peter-Thiel sense of the word) being formed in our tech subsector. Even YC’s latest ‘Request for Startups’ focuses on US manufacturing and hard tech.
Northwood Space raised a $6M Seed round this week to mass produce ground stations for satellite communications. Notably the company is led by Disney actress Bridgit Mendler who also has a passion for space law. Mendler’s husband is the CTO and a third co-founder is the Head of Software.
Sensos has raised a $20M Series A to develop a smart label and shipping intelligence platform. The company was spun out of Sony Semiconductor Israel in 2022 and uses a small credit card sized sensor to report temperature, pressure, tilt, shock, and position of packages during transit.
Cosmic Aerospace raised a $4.5M Seed round to develop a high-efficiency electric airliner with a 1000km range. The company is focusing on designing an airframe and propulsion system that can become commercially viable with existing battery technology. Pale Blue Dot led with a cohort of participating investors including Fifty Years.
Elroy Air raised $8.56M in capital. The company has been extending its Series A for a few years now to develop an autonomous eVTOL aircraft designed for ~500km logistics flights.
Roam Electric $24M Series A to scale its electric motorcycle production in Kenya to 1000+ units/mo. Roam is one of a few EV startups in Africa where charging infrastructure, etc are very different. Roam’s production facility in Nairobi is one of the largest on the continent.
Interesting Jobs 👩🔧:
Intuitive Machines is looking for a systems engineer level II.
Elroy Air is looking for a senior electrical engineer.
Eight Sleep is looking for an electrical engineer.
Shield AI is looking for a senior electrical engineer.
Q Bio is looking for a hardware/medical device senior program manager.
LEO Labs is looking for an electrical engineer.
Level is looking for an electrical engineer.
Internships 📚:
Q Bio is looking for an electrical engineer graduate intern.
Teledyne is looking for a hardware engineer intern.
Aurora is looking for an electrical engineering intern.
Yank Technologies is looking for a printed circuit board design intern.
Shark Ninja is looking for an electrical engineer intern.
To see previous jobs that may still be open, check out our previous issues! Want to share an exciting role at your company? Reach out to us at info@theanalog.io.
Featured Job: Technical Writer (part-time) at The Analog. Come work with us!
A SpaceX Raptor rocket engine.
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