Analyzing the hardware business opportunities in Industry 4.0

Nowadays, intelligent manufacturing represented by Industry 4.0 is changing the future form of manufacturing. In this new manufacturing system, data is the soul element and occupies a core position. Let's learn about the relevant content with the editor of Industrial Control.

However, this does not mean that hardware will be marginalized in Industry 4.0. After all, data still needs to be carried through hardware to present its value in the real world. Therefore, the rise of "data" in smart manufacturing will also bring a lot of business opportunities to hardware. Next, from the direction of the "data flow" of Industry 4.0, we can better understand and discover the potential "money prospects" of hardware in each link.

Sensing

In industrial control systems, sensors are the data acquisition terminals. They are responsible for converting a large number of non-electrical physical and chemical parameters at the industrial site into electrical signals, and then the system interprets key data information from them as the basis for control decisions. Smart manufacturing's reliance on data will inevitably stimulate the demand for sensors. In the future, the industrial market's demand for pressure, displacement, acceleration, angular velocity, temperature, humidity, gas, photosensitivity and other sensors will show an overall upward trend.

Another area worth paying attention to is the market for CMOS image sensors, a core component of machine vision. According to IC Insights, the global industrial CMOS image sensor market will grow from $396 million in 2015 to $912 million in 2020. In addition, the application of multi-view 3D vision in industrial scenarios will help to collect more abundant image data with the help of image sensors, and the effect will be more significant. Image sensors will also become a "piece of cake" in the industrial sensor market that cannot be underestimated.

interconnection

The data generated by the intelligent manufacturing system needs to be transmitted and shared via a fast and stable network. Germany's "Industry 4.0 R&D White Paper" regards wireless technology as a key project in the research of Industry 4.0 network communication technology. Compared with traditional wired industrial communications, wireless interconnection technology has significant advantages: First, the network construction and maintenance costs are low. According to tests, the installation and maintenance costs of the wireless measurement and control system can be reduced by 90%; second, it improves the flexibility of production line equipment configuration and is more in line with the "flexibility" requirements of the "mass customization" vision of intelligent manufacturing; third, it can adapt to the diverse networking application scenarios and the deployment requirements of various networks such as Mesh and star.

Therefore, whether it is the original wireless protocols in the industrial field, such as WIA-PA, Wireless HART and ISA, or the general wireless protocols, such as Wi-Fi, Zigbee, NFC, Bluetooth, 2G/3G/4G network communications, they are all influencing and penetrating the industrial field. How to integrate emerging LPWAN wireless communication technologies such as NB-IoT into industrial applications has also been included in the consideration of some companies. 5G is also in the scope of Industry 4.0. According to the plan, the design and standards of the public 5G network infrastructure will be realized in 2018 to provide wide area network services for the industry.

However, industrial applications have more specific requirements for wireless communications, especially in terms of reliability and low latency. Therefore, some general wireless technologies will still be used in non-real-time control scenarios such as equipment and product information collection and internal information interaction in the short term. In the future, they will form a composite communication system with real-time industrial control networks to build an efficient and reliable pipeline for data.

Wireless interconnection and sensor technology are also moving towards integration, and wireless sensors with wireless data communication functions will also become a new market growth point. Wireless sensor networks can get rid of the constraints of traditional sensor buses, making data aggregation more flexible and cost-effective. On this basis, sensor products can also be superimposed with other technologies such as energy harvesting to form more diversified products and expand the application landscape.

Figure 1: Currently, wireless interconnection and sensor technology are also moving towards integration. Wireless sensors with wireless data communication functions will also become a new market growth point

The blueprint of wireless interconnection is certainly exciting, but in the industrial field, wired connections are also indispensable, especially for industrial data communication applications that require large bandwidth, high reliability, and fast response. Therefore, it has also spawned the demand for high-performance and high-reliability industrial connectors. Faced with this high-value-added market, connector manufacturers are also working hard. For example, today's M8/M12 connectors can support network speeds up to 1Gbps.

Data Decision

Gathering data to the cloud for analysis and processing, and analyzing with existing databases to provide decision-making suggestions is the core of Industry 4.0. This will affect the demand for data centers in industrial applications. Whether using public clouds or building private clouds, the increase in the total number of data centers is an inevitable trend. It is estimated that by 2019, the global market size of data center infrastructure equipment will reach 44 billion US dollars.

In the face of increasingly heavy data processing tasks in the future, more powerful processors are needed to support them. New heterogeneous processor architectures are coming on stage to solve the computing bottlenecks encountered by multi-core general-purpose processors. Developers are considering the CPU+GPU model to maximize the GPU's capabilities in floating-point operations. At the same time, FPGA, a programming logic architecture, has also attracted much attention. After integrating FPGA with general-purpose processors, it is expected to become the mainstream architecture of future data center servers. The acquisition of Altera, the world's second largest FPGA manufacturer, by Intel, the market leader in server processors, confirms this trend. Subsequently, Qualcomm also announced an alliance with Xilinx, the world's largest FPGA manufacturer, and Mellanox, to form a market confrontation with Intel.

It is worth noting that with the surge in computing power of data centers, their power consumption is also becoming more and more considerable. According to statistics in 2015, the total number of data centers in the world has exceeded 3 million, and their power consumption has accounted for 1.1%-1.5% of the total global power consumption. From the analysis of the operating costs of a single data center, electricity costs account for 70%, which has far exceeded the cost of hardware infrastructure equipment. Data centers have great energy-saving needs. Therefore, the power supply architecture of data centers is also changing. For example, the central transformer directly converts AC power into 380V high-voltage DC, and distributes it to each power unit through the high-voltage DC bus, which simplifies the structure and improves efficiency. Similar changes also provide market opportunities for power management components related to data centers. According to reports, the scale of energy-saving transformation of data centers in China in 2015 was about 3 billion yuan, and it is expected that this value will continue to rise in the next five years.

Figure 2: Whether using public cloud or building private cloud, the increase in the total number of data centers is an inevitable trend. It is estimated that by 2019, the global data center infrastructure market size will reach US$44 billion.

implement

After the data is analyzed and processed in the cloud, the resulting recommendations and decisions will be sent back to the execution end, which will then cause mechanical action, forming a complete control cycle from end to cloud and from cloud to end. Mechanical actions in the manufacturing industry are all driven by motors, so precision motor control will become a market growth point for the birth of Industry 4.0. From a hardware perspective, this will also provide opportunities for core digital control chips such as MCU, DSP, and FPGA to display their talents.

Figure 3: After 2010, China's industrial robot market entered a rapid growth channel

Industrial robots are an important "existence" in the Industry 4.0 system. They are more intelligent and comprehensive execution equipment. In 2015, the global sales of industrial robots reached 240,000 units, with an annual growth rate of 15% in the past five years. The Chinese market is considered to be the next region where industrial robots will show a significant growth. Taking the Chinese market as an example, the annual growth rate of the industrial robot market from 2010 to 2015 reached 35%, with a total of 66,000 units. If it develops at this rate, it is expected that by 2020, China will account for 40% of the global industrial robot market. Driven by the market, several core components required for industrial robots - servo systems, reducers, and controllers - will also grow synchronously. In particular, in the industrial robot controller market, the industry has gradually realized that the closed system designed and developed independently by robot manufacturers in the past can no longer meet the rapidly developing market needs. Standardization and openness are becoming a trend. Some independent robot controller manufacturers have begun to become active in the market. Whether they can use the power of the market to change the ecology of industrial robots in the future is indeed worth waiting for.

In short, the data-driven Industry 4.0 revolution does not bring simple linear product iteration to the manufacturing industry, but is accompanied by new architectures, new categories, and new models. We have only seen a small part of it now, and more hardware opportunities need to be continuously explored in response to market development.

The above is an introduction to analyzing hardware business opportunities in Industry 4.0 in industrial control. If you want to know more related information, please pay more attention to eeworld. eeworld Electronic Engineering will provide you with more complete, detailed and updated information.