Exhausted, yet extremely fulfilled I sit here at the Bay of San Francisco with the best view one could wish for; the Golden Gate Bridge. It's an amazing sight (and engineering feat) and it has been an amazing study tour. The last three weeks have been one of the busiest and intense times of my life, which evidently has reflected itself in my sleeping behaviour. With the 21 universities and companies we have visited we have seen the many fields and facets of (electrical) engineering. We have seen exciting engineering like the high voltage lab at Waterloo university, innovation in its purest form in the living room at Upverter, boring engineers incapable of delivering a presentation where I don't fall asleep, game changers and engineers that are completely convinced of the power of their technology ("slurp").
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Written by SPOCK on Monday May 23, 2016
Friday, the last "full" day of our study tour. We woke up at 7am (which must have been way too early for those who had been celebrating Berjan's birthday last night) and took off to Campbell for a visit to Dialog Semiconductors. After enjoying an excellent breakfast (thumbs up!) we were welcomed by Johannes de Groot and Davin Lee who introduced us to the main outlines of the company. Dialog Semiconductor is a fabless supplier of mixed signal IC's for various applications. At this location, the main focus is on power conversion and management. We enjoyed in-depth lectures on how Dialog aims to follow the increasing demand for rapid charging of phones and other mobile devices by developing intelligent chargers. These chargers, compatible with major phone brands, are able to communicate with the device and vary their voltage level depending on what the device desires.
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Written by SPOCK on Monday May 23, 2016
The day began in the middle of the night with a wake up snore of a roommate and the happy breeze of the air conditioning. After turning both off a good night sleep was enjoyed with the opportunity of sleeping in till eight o’clock, one hour more than normal! A quick and simple breakfast was enjoyed after which we took off to California’s Great America. California’s Great America has been in business since 1976 with a current revenue of 200 million dollars and approximately 2000 staff members.
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Written by SPOCK on Monday May 23, 2016
Today's program consisted of visits to an university, a company and in the evening a visit to an escape room.
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Written by SPOCK on Monday May 23, 2016
Today was the first visit to Silicon Valley and after some crazy days with fun and intense activities, people had to get up early again to visit some companies. The first company being Gainspeed. Since we drove on regular hours we hit the daily traffic and picked up some delay. Luckily this was all predicted and we arrived in time and started with some coffee (Hooray!).
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Written by SPOCK on Monday May 23, 2016
To convince the people of the Ufonds (who subsidized the study tour) that we actually went to San Francisco, we have to prepare photographic proof of our visit. What place in San Francisco could be better than the Golden Gate Bridge? This has to happen in (Dutch) style of course, so we decided to rent bikes and afterwards make our way across the bridge. Conveniently, this also served as a nice way to burn off some of the burger calories that we've gathered over the course of our trip (and the IHOP breakfast that kicked off our day).
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Written by SPOCK on Wednesday May 18, 2016
For this Sunday we even had a bigger road trip ahead then yesterday. We had to make an almost 500 kilometre trip from San Luis Obispo to Redwood in Silicon Valley. Too bad though because the hotel which we left had some king-size beds and for some of us that was a warm welcome. On the other hand we would go to Silicon Valley. But we started with a joint activity quad driving. So we went to Grover Beach where 12 quads were rented. The group was split and both groups had an hour to explore the dunes. The Oceano Dunes, as they are called, have an area of 445 hectares along a 8 kilometre long beach. This part of the beach is used by riders to park their trailers and trucks. We where just some weird tourist riding a quad for the first time. But that doesn’t mean we didn’t have fun.
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Written by B. van de Vijver on Wednesday May 18, 2016
After the cantus last night, everybody was up relatively early for the roadtrip to San Luis Obispo. After picking up Gijs from his motel, we spread out to get some breakfast. After we enjoyed pancakes, pizzas, bread or something else, the good news came that we would go to a shooting range today. Small groups could fire rounds with any weapon they liked for 1 hour, which was an exiting opportunity for all of us. We started with a Glock 17, but it didn't take long before the big guns came to the range.
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Written by SPOCK on Sunday May 15, 2016
This day would prove to be one of the bussiest of our study tour with three company visits (UCSB, Google and Sonos) and the cantus. We were told to have all of our gear with us for the whole day, we would not return to the hostel any time soon. So after a limited amount of sleep we woke up at seven to have early breakfast at IHOP.
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Written by SPOCK on Sunday May 15, 2016
After our four day stay in Los Angeles, the time had come to expand our horizon towards San Jose: today would be a road trip ending in Carpinteria, near Santa Barbara.
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Written by SPOCK on Sunday May 15, 2016
