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Self Optimised Manufacture The Bosch Wafer Fab in Dresden, Germany is touted as the world’s most modern. Deepti Thore looks at the capabilities of the smart, future-ready factory.
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he automotive industry, globally, is finding ways to overcome the shortage of semiconductors. In effect, even with demand sentiment improving, these big supply-side constraints are the biggest handicap for automotive Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEM). It is feared to continue to negatively impact growth for the rest of the fiscal. For a semiconductor, wafers are the key input raw material. After all, it is on these wafers that fabrication with a series of repeated sequential steps aid in the production of electronic circuits on the semiconductor wafer. Bosch is among manufacturers looking at capacity expansion and key acquisitions to ease the bottleneck that is nothing short of a crisis. Dr Volkmar Denner, Chairman of the Board of Management, Robert Bosch GmbH, in a company release claims, “In Dresden, with the help of artificial intelligence, we will take semiconductor manufacturing to the next level.” In June 2021, the company had announced the inauguration of Bosch Wafer Fab in Dresden, Germany. Touted as the world’s most modern wafer fabrication labs. The
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smart, future-ready factory is claimed to be fully connected, data-driven, and notably capable of selfoptimising. At the factory, the integrated processes coupled with Artificial Intelligence (AI) sets a new benchmark for industry 4.0 manufacturing as per Denner. “The new wafer fab is the single largest investment in the company’s history. This cannot be stressed too much. Its size and additional production capacity alone are impressive. The very latest methods of data-driven continuous improvement in production make the Dresden plant a smart factory. To put it another way: in this plant, natural and artificial intelligence have joined forces with the internet of things to form a productive symbiosis,” he mentions.
Smart manufacturing
Automotive chips are special grade chips. Subjected to varied and challenging operating conditions in different terrains and in suboptimal conditions, they require special expertise. As chips must meet higher standards of reliability, it translates to the development of automotive semiconductors being more
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