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Politics : Formerly About Applied Materials -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: StanX Long who wrote (60811)	2/21/2002 2:40:41 AM
From: StanX Long	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 70976

Dawn of the Wireless Fabs? e-insite.net By Jeff Chappell -- Electronic News, 2/19/2002 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 in the past few years 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. For instance, Boeing 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."