Dawn of the wireless fabs? Manufacturing is about to go wireless, and the change will happen none too soon - News

Electronic News, Feb 25, 2002 by Jeff Chappell

Manufacturers of all kinds have spent the past few years struggling with two big problems: they need to electronically monitor the status of parts and processes during manufacturing, but there are some places wires just won't go.

Yet the semiconductor industry, admittedly behind the times when it comes to e-manufacturing techniques, has just begun to embrace the idea of connecting fab tools to a network and using data feedback and feed forward to economize process efficiency.

Once the industry catches up, it will be throwing out those network cables, as other industries are doing. Boeing, for instance, needed a way to monitor the pressure of the rivets being punched into the wing-skin of its 747 airliners. The rivet device is suspended on a block-long track that swings out over the wing.

How do you hardwire an impact sensor across a constantly moving apparatus? "Physically it was impossible to hardwire it," said Dick Slansky, senior analyst at ARC Advisory Group in Dedham, Mass. "But they wanted to monitor the upside pressure of the riveting. Now they're collecting the data from wireless sensors."

Wireless devices are freeing the manufacturing floor from all sorts of troublesome monitoring challenges. "A lot of people are looking at wireless LAN technology for plant floor and for replacing physical cables in office buildings," said Dennis Gaughan, principal analyst at Boston-based AMR Research. "We're seeing the use of handheld devices in manufacturing. If I'm a shop-floor supervisor, I can walk around and monitor the equipment."

Though analysts and executives at application vendors agree that wireless devices used in manufacturing are in their infancy, real-world solutions already are taking hold. Wireless devices are showing up as hard-to-reach sensors, maintenance device tools and temperature gauges.

"On the process side of manufacturing, there is a real need to get into the sensor level," said George Heath, industry marketing manager at eMation Inc., a wireless application producer in Mansfield, Mass. "If a chemical manufacturer is getting the wrong output, he needs information that is hard to get to, such as measuring temperature. He needs to be able to collect information that is out of reach."

Wireless technologies also allow manufacturers to avoid costly breakdowns. Monitoring equipment for potential failure is now called device relationship management (DRM). DRM can be run by an equipment supplier, which places wireless sensors in places that can't be wired.

Once the sensor is in place, the equipment company can monitor its equipment performance on the manufacturing floor. The sensor sends the information via the Internet to the equipment company's home base, thus allowing the company to monitor its equipment wherever it's installed around the world.

Wireless technology also saves time and expense in reconfiguring manufacturing plants. "Companies are using wireless LANs on shop floors where they have to reconfigure equipment or reconfigure the floor," Gaughan said. "With wireless, they can reconfigure without rewiring the floor."

Wireless can lighten the burden of retrofitting an older factory for e-manufacturing and it can free workers from the chain of the computer station.

"The WAP phone helps to make your workforce mobile, which makes people more productive," said Russ Agrusa, president of Iconics Inc., a producer of wireless applications in Foxborough, Mass. "If you're glued to the tube, you aren't as productive as when you're wandering around. We have the mobile HMI (human machine interaction) that sends data from the factory floor directly to the pocket phone."