Breakfast Bytes Blogs

Today we are at the dawn of the fourth industrial revolution, or Industry 4.0 as it is sometimes called. Let's start by looking back to the first three.

It is well known that Henry Ford created the original assembly line. However, in some ways, it was preceded by the gun manufacturers, who were the first people to create designs with interchangeable parts. When I worked in a Cadbury chocolate factory when I was about 20, if a machine broke the person who came to fix it was still known as a "fitter". Before the Henry Ford era, parts had poor tolerance, and so the most skilled hands-on engineers were required to file the parts to make them fit, and it was a term of pride to be a fitter. It's funny how these terms of pride live on. Another one from Britain are surgeons. They used to be considered to be little more than crude butchers by the medical profession and were not allowed to call themselves doctors. It became a term of pride, and even today, when a doctor becomes a surgeon they switch from being Dr. Smith to being Mr. Smith.

The First Three Industrial Revolutions

I think that we can consider Henry Ford and his imitators as being part of the second industrial revolution, industry 2.0. The first industrial revolution, Industry 1.0, came about with the transition from hand production to machines, and especially the invention of the steam engine. Machines and steam power (and water power) were first adopted widely in the British textile industry (see picture at the start of this post of a spinning jenny). For a deeper dive into this era, see my post Quarry Bank Mill: A Technology Museum from the Industrial Revolution. This obviously had major impacts on society, but that is beyond the scope of this blog post today.

The second industrial revolution, Industry 2.0 was driven by the invention of the railroad and telegraph, the start of conquering distance. Perhaps more important was electrification for power and lighting and the invention of the modern assembly line pioneered by Ford. Steam was still used for railroads, but factories switched to electricity. It seems to have taken a surprisingly long time for people to realize that you didn't put a giant electric engine to replace the steam engine, instead you powered each machine with its own small electric motor. It was much easier to distribute electricity than mechanical power with all those shafts and belts.

In the late 20th century we had the "digital revolution" which I'm calling the third industrial revolution, Industry 3.0. This started soon after the Second World War, kickstarted by various developments that had taken place during the war (in secret, of course). You can pick your favorite product to be the first digital computer. You can read about my choice in my post Colossus: the First Programmable Digital Electronic Computer (see picture). Or if electromechanical computers are good, see my post German Computer Museums. Tubes (valves) gave way to transistors, and then to integrated circuits. Moore's Law got going and delivered more and more capability for cheaper and cheaper prices.

When I started at VLSI Technology in the early 1980s, one of our investors was Evans and Sutherland. They built flight simulators with the top-of-the-line graphics for the time, costing tens of millions of dollars. Today, you can buy an iPad and run Microsoft Flight Simulator for a few hundred dollars, with many orders of magnitude more capability. And if you really want the experience of being in a cabin with all those hydraulic actuators mimicking gravity and acceleration, then go to a Disney park and ride Star Tours. In the 1990s, the internet came along, and in 2007 the iPhone, the first real smartphone, was announced. Now we all have the total of the world's knowledge in our pockets and a picture of what our friends had for lunch.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution

The fourth industrial revolution has been gathering steam (as we still say, a very second industrial revolution turn-of-phrase). If you look around the net, you can find many different definitions. It seems to be accepted that the term was first defined by Klaus Schwab, the chairman of the World Economic Forum, which runs Davos. He literally wrote the book on it: The Fourth Industrial Revolution.

Previous industrial revolutions liberated humankind from animal power, made mass production possible and brought digital capabilities to billions of people. This Fourth Industrial Revolution is, however, fundamentally different. It is characterized by a range of new technologies that are fusing the physical, digital and biological worlds, impacting all disciplines, economies and industries, and even challenging ideas about what it means to be human.

The resulting shifts and disruptions mean that we live in a time of great promise and great peril. The world has the potential to connect billions more people to digital networks, dramatically improve the efficiency of organizations and even manage assets in ways that can help regenerate the natural environment, potentially undoing the damage of previous industrial revolutions.

That is a bit vague, and I think that the biggest change is "smart factories". A semiconductor fab is a good example. If you ever see a picture of a modern fab, the first thing you notice is that there are rarely any people in the photograph. A modern fab is fully automated, and it is monitored by skilled technicians looking at computer screens outside the clean rooms themselves. I think that making a modern advanced node semiconductor is the most complex manufacturing process in the world. It is also one of the most expensive, when a single EUV stepper costs something like $140M. Lithography tends to be the bottleneck of semiconductor manufacturing, so EUV in a fab is a bit like the famous Lay's potato chip slogan "Betcha Can't Eat Just One”. You need a lot of them. Semiconductor manufacturers are famously cagey about how many they have, saying just what fraction of the world's EUV machines they have. For example, in my post Samsung Foundry Fab Roadmap, Samsung stated that they have 24% of the world's EUV machines. The capital required to manufacture an advanced node at scale is enormous, $15-20B. By comparison, the most advanced aircraft carrier the US has ever built is the USS Ford. It cost "only" $13.3B (and that was 30% over budget).

Another good example of a smart factory technology is additive manufacturing, sometimes known as 3D printing. On a small scale, you can by a 3D printer to have at home and make complex small plastic parts. But on an industrial scale, additive manufacturing is used to make turbine blades for jet engines. It allows parts to be created that are impossible using what has become known as subtractive manufacturing—taking a block of material and machining away the unwanted parts. Just as a semiconductor fab can build any part in the appropriate processes, an additive manufacturing factory can make anything with the supported materials (up to some maximum physical size, of course).

Robotics in general are another aspect of Industry 4.0. If you squint right, you can look at a semiconductor fab and say it is full of robots, specialized robots that do things like ion implantation or CMP. I don't see any good reason to exclude them from the "robot" title and yet include the robots that you regularly see doing much of the assembly Tesla cars. Another buzzword you may see in this context are Cyber-Physical System (CPS), which involve both physical things like 3D printing, lithography, or robots, along with advanced communication and computing technologies.

One aspect of smart factories is that they generate data. Lots of it. I have seen estimates that a single factory can generate 5 PB/week. Sometimes this can be processed procedurally, but increasingly deep learning approaches are required to detect anomalies in so much data. Drinking from a firehose seems a tame analogy, more like trying to swallow a tsunami.

Summary

The intelligent factory is more than a quality initiative, 3D printer, electronic sensors, or analytics—it’s all of those things, optimized together, for performance, production, and community.

Last year, the IEEE organized a Special Day on Cyber-Physical Systems.  This was then covered in a recent edition of IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computing. Here's a paragraph from the introduction:

The Smart Manufacturing and Industry 4.0 paradigms are transforming factories into highly complex IT systems, generating massive amounts of data. The modeling and optimization of smart industrial processes, to support decision making, has consequently become a new application domain, with its own unique and peculiar issues, for some of the most prominent emerging technologies across the entire computing stack, from hardware and systems design to application-level software.

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