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Continued from page 1
The “Lone Start Ups” The Lone Star State is seeing a
surge of new tech investment as com- panies continue to expand out of the claustrophobic San Francisco Bay Area. Texas has been a leader in tele - communications and computing serv- ices for years, with the area around Austin earning the nickname “The Sil- icon Hills.” For nearly a decade, the re- gion has raked in huge amounts of venture capital cash, regularly over half a billion dollars per year. Texas is also more attractive to
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companies because of the lower cost of living for employees. In fact, ac- cording to entrepreneur Patrick McKenna, head of One America Works, a firm that connects compa- nies with employees and cities with companies, “Instead of hiring some- one who just graduated from the University of Wisconsin’s IT pro- gram or from the University of Texas and moving them to California, why not just leave them where they are? It takes the pressure off the housing stock in the Bay Area.” He goes on to explain that this makes the quality of life better for those in Silicon Val- ley, companies can hire great talent at lower cost, and it is a great way to distribute work around the country. We may also see a bump in em-
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ployee migration as a result of COVID-19. Many workers are eyeing homes in places like Denver, Austin and Miami, because they expect their offices in New York City or San Fran- cisco to stay closed permanently.
5G on the Shop Floor 5G is already a ubiquitous
term, but actual use cases are com- ing in waves. According to market re- search firm McKinsey, the first 5G use cases will be around enhanced mobile broadband (EMBB), followed by ultra-reliable low-latency commu- nication (URLLC), with massive ma- chine-type communication (MMTC) built upon them. The benefits to speed and connec- tivity are obvious: 5G devices support
September, 2020 5G Worth the Wait
speeds 100 times faster than LTE, a 100-fold increase in number of con- nected devices per square mile, latency as low as 1 millisecond, and a 90 per- cent reduction in power consumption. For manufacturers, opportuni-
ties will come in the form of low-cost, autonomous and remotely managed machines that will improve the shop floor, such as efficient AGVs. Also, the speed and reliability of the net- work will allow for greater and more accurate vision quality checks and a boost to computer vision and ma- chine learning. For example, most industrial ro-
bots can only pick up objects from pre- determined locations at specific times. With 5G, information will be able to flow quickly enough that robots can make real-time decisions, such as us- ing their sophisticated vision to locate parts around the factory and deposit them wherever they are needed. In the meantime, electronics
manufacturers will benefit largely from an enormous demand for 5G In- ternet of Things (IoT) devices. The greatest gains will be seen by manu- facturers of radio chips and proces- sors, with module builders riding the wave. Passive component manufac- turers, such as those who build an- tennas, are also expected to see a huge increase in demand. According to McKinsey, the first
wave of 5G applications are already transforming the business-to-con- sumer (B2C) market, and industrial manufacturers can learn from this experience. Manufacturers should study current 5G B2C IoT modules and figure out how they can be de- ployed quickly on the factory floor. This kind of preparation is essential for firms to keep pace with the adop- tion of 5G and to be ready in the event of new requirements, stan- dards or customer demands. The smart factory is often imag-
ined as a gleaming, silvery, hangar- sized building filled with spotless ro- bots whisking product from machine to machine, without a single human worker. Those dreamers may yet be right. r
Continued from page 1 Micro Robots Walk...
circuit made from silicon photo- voltaics — which essentially func- tions as the torso and brain — and four electrochemical actuators that function as legs. The team controls the robots by
flashing laser pulses at different pho- tovoltaics, each of which charges up a separate set of legs. By toggling the laser back and forth between the front and back photovoltaics, the ro- bots walk. These little robots are certainly
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high tech, but they operate on incred- ibly low voltages, 200 mV, and low power, 10 nW, yet remain durable and robust for their small stature. Because they are made with stan- dard lithographic processes, they can be fabricated in parallel. About one million bots fit on a 4 in. (102 mm) silicon wafer. The researchers are exploring
ways to soup up the robots with more complicated electronics and on- board com putation. These improve- ments could one day result in swarms of microscope robots crawl- ing through and restructuring mate- rials, suturing blood vessels or being
dispatched en masse to probe parts of the human brain. “Controlling a tiny robot is maybe
as close as you can come to shrinking yourself down,” says Marc Miskin, lead author on the team’s paper titled “Elec- tronically Integrated, Mass-Manufac- tured, Microscopic Robots.” “This research breakthrough
provides exciting scientific opportu- nity for investigating new questions relevant to the physics of active mat- ter and may ultimately lead to futur- istic robotic materials,” says Sam Stanton, program manager for the Army Research Office, and element of the Combat Capabilities Develop- ment Command’s Army Research Li- brary, which supported the research. Additional support was provid-
ed by the Air Force Office of Scientif- ic Research, the Cornell Center for Materials Research, which is sup- ported by the National Science Foun- dation’s Materials Research Science and Engineering Center program, and the Kavli Institute at Cornell for Nanoscale Science. The work was performed at the Cornell Nanoscale Science and Technology Facility. Web:
www.cornell.edu r
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