The Hardware Brief #2: what Ohio's new NSF Engine actually funds

Medtech development shifts from sequential handoffs to concurrent design

Design freezes on complex devices keep surfacing unresolved manufacturing and regulatory risk, because engineering, quality, and supply chain still work in sequence instead of in parallel. The argument is to pull manufacturing and regulatory into architecture decisions before the freeze rather than after it.

Why it matters: if a DFM review is the first time manufacturing sees the design, it is not a review. It is a rework order with a nicer name.

NXP's RW610FML combines Wi-Fi 6, BLE, and an Arm M33 core

The pre-production RW610FML pairs a Wi-Fi 6 and BLE radio with a 260 MHz Cortex-M33 that can double as the host MCU, letting a connected product drop its discrete communications processor entirely.

Why it matters: collapsing two chips into one removes a part number, a supply risk, and a firmware port from the build. Worth pricing against your current two-chip stack before the next respin, not after it.

Heron Power to build a 40 GW power conversion plant in California

Heron Power's $100M-plus Morgan Hill facility is a bet that US-sourced power conversion hardware, meaning inverters and solid-state transformers, is becoming investable at scale as domestic sourcing requirements tighten for grid and data-center projects.

Why it matters: domestic conversion capacity changes the lead-time math on anything that moves real current. If your inverter or transformer supply currently runs through a single overseas vendor, this is the year to have the second-source conversation.

What Northeast Ohio's new NSF Engine actually funds

NSF named NEO-SMART one of 12 Regional Innovation Engines in July, the only Ohio awardee, led by Case Western Reserve with more than 70 partners across 18 counties. Focus areas are metals, polymers, and chemicals and coatings. The headline is up to $160M over ten years; the near-term figure is $7.5M in each of the first two years, milestone-gated and spread across that entire coalition.

Why it matters: there is no solicitation, portal, or deadline, so this is not a grant anyone applies for. Participation runs through coalition relationships. And for a for-profit, a federal Engine subaward is cost-reimbursement only: no fee, no profit line, and a de minimis indirect rate that will not carry real overhead. The same work as a vendor on a procurement contract to a funded party does not carry that restriction. Ten minutes with grants counsel before signing either one is cheap.

A full handheld console built entirely from off-the-shelf Arduino parts

Zalmotek's RetroArch handheld uses only stock Arduino UNO Q, Modulino, and Waveshare modules with premade cabling. No custom PCB, and no soldering anywhere in the build.

Why it matters: a useful benchmark for how much of an early prototype can now be bought rather than built. The custom board can wait until the concept is proven.

Piotr Grzesik brought working PCI slots to a hand-built 68000

Grzesik reverse-engineered a PCI card's FPGA logic and wrote his own VHDL implementation to get functional PCI slots running on a homebrew Motorola 68000 system.

Why it matters: the method generalizes to any undocumented bus inherited with a legacy product: capture the traffic, infer the protocol, reimplement it.

Sep 17

Ohio Space Forum, Hilton Cleveland Downtown

A full day on how Ohio research reaches orbit, with sessions on hard-tech startup growth, lunar power systems, space policy, and workforce for emerging nuclear space technology.

Sep 29–30

JumpStart VC Fest, Huntington Convention Center, Cleveland

Two days of pitches, curated one-on-one investor meetings, and a twenty-company demo zone. Last year drew 298 founders and 110 investors from 38 states. It anchors Cleveland Tech Week, which runs September 26 to October 3 with more than 100 events across the region.