15th Philly Hardware Meetup @ Drexel!
Join us for the 15th Philadelphia Hardware Meetup! Come join us to hear from our guest speakers as well as share what’s on your desk. We always have time for an open mic.
This time, we're at Drexel University's Bossone Research Enterprise Center. This is our first time collaborating with a university as a venue and we're really excited to connect more students to professionals!
Hardware Meetups happen across 30+ cities monthly and help bring together different professionals to connect and meet each other.
We will have a great set of featured speakers for the evening!:
Glennon Simmons is co-founder and CEO of Portable Diagnostic Systems (PDS), a biotech company developing portable, lab-quality diagnostic technology for use outside traditional laboratories. An inventor and entrepreneur with nearly two decades of experience in microfluidics and point-of-care diagnostics, Glennon previously led research and development of lab-on-a-chip technologies at New York University. Building on that work, he founded PDS to address critical gaps in rapid drug detection and forensic toxicology. The company's Integrity-1 Analysis System combines microfluidics, biosensing, machine vision, and AI to detect multiple drugs from small fluid samples in minutes, bringing sophisticated testing capabilities directly to clinicians, investigators, and first responders.
Matt Starfield, Senior EE at Solid Product Design and advisor at NextFab Ventures. He earned his MS-EE from Drexel University in 2007, where he did his graduate research in the Drexel Wireless Systems Lab under Dr. Kapil Dandekar. Since then, Matt has spent more than a decade helping hardware startups go from idea, to prototype, to product. Today, he develops advanced agentic AI systems that apply that same rigor and discipline, autonomously. Matt shares the origin story, methods, guardrails, and bench-proven results from a year of building advanced AI systems into his daily hardware engineering work. Expect a clear preview of where agentic hardware development is going next.
Chris Chong, co-founder and the Chief Design Officer at Mexar, a climate adaptation startup which launched their first product, the Vapor, this Summer. Chris is joining us to talk about the development and manufacturing process behind the Vapor.
Thank you to our partners!:
Efinix manufactures the world’s most efficient FPGAs. Delivering low power, high performance and small physical size, Efinix FPGAs offer fast time to market in a cost-effective footprint. Efinix offers three families of FPGAs from the entry level Trion family that prioritizes I/O and connectivity to the Titanium family that offer high speed transceivers and high compute capability for industrial, edge and highly accelerated AI applications. The portfolio spans 4,000 logic elements up 375,000 logic elements and includes SiP offering with Flash and system memory in the same FPGA package. These highly integrated solutions reduce design complexity, increase available I/O and further speed time to market. The Efinix Efinity tool suite is freely available and delivers an intuitive RTL to bit-stream capability while supporting a rich IP library and software compilers for the suite of Sapphire RISC-V processors available as both hard IP and soft macros across the Efinix portfolio. Efinix FPGAs have been widely adopted in a broad array of markets from industrial automation , communications, medical, automotive and test and measurement. To find out more about Efinix products and markets, visit www.efinixinc.com.
Ben Franklin Technology Partners creates and retains highly paid, sustainable jobs by investing in and linking early-stage technology firms and established manufacturers with experts, universities, follow-on funding, and other resources to help them prosper through innovation.