I was aware of the Smart Factory concept, but I knew little about the systems that enable it. So I decided to take a look at two smart factory systems OPC-UA and RAMI 4.0 AAS. The innovations of the last 200 years have brought humanity countless benefits. As industrial growth…
The idea of a fully autonomous car has become widely accepted. Each year new models of car come closer and closer to the self-driving concept. One often overlooked aspect of autonomous transportation is the idea of Urban Air Mobility. (UAM). UAM is the realisation of the pilotless air taxi, a…
In this blog, I recommend the two best resources on the internet regarding digital twins and how they can improve production capacity and efficiency. The Digital Twin (DT) concept is often allied to the Industry 4.0 movement. NASA first described the idea of a digital twin in 2011 as a…
It is hard to escape from the word innovation; from CVs to performance appraisals and company mission statements, it is omnipresent. In the 1990’s it was synergy; in the 2000’s it was collaboration. Today the must use word is innovation. The expression innovation has its origins in the Latin word…
It’s a chip crunch and you’re the CEO. Let’s try my new calculator for a bit of fun. You have recently been appointed the CEO of a major semiconductor company. Set your good die per wafer targets, factory output and the average selling price of your ICs and CPUs. What…
The richest man in the world is changing jobs. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is to be replaced by Amazon Web Services’ Andy Jassy. What does the culture look like in Jassy’s AWS, and are there any implications for Amazon? The culture at AWS is one of constant iteration; an organisation…
Starting a new job is stressful. People talk in strange and new acronyms; they ask you to post information to shared drives whose location is a mystery to you. You barely know where the restrooms are. Once again, you have a total beginners mind. I find all this quite unsettling,…
I have worked in industry for thirty-seven years, and I have often come across a blame culture within some of the organisations that I worked for. A blame culture is a predisposition within an organisation to find an apparent, simple reason for why something bad has happened. (Rosling 2019) It…
I frequently hear semiconductor companies proclaiming the low leakage of their transistors. But what do they mean and why should we care? Many expressions describe transistor leakage; leakage, off current, standby current, sleep current, IOFF and many more. The terminology is confusing and perplexing. These expressions describe one aspect of…
It was 41 years ago that I started my physics degree at Strathclyde University. I found physics a challenging and demanding area of study, especially the mathematical knowledge that it required. In 1980 I was introduced to the world of Fourier transforms, FT, I froze, I was afraid, I just…
