The Original Rhythmeering Blog » Nanotechnology

Manufacturing 3.0

Laurence — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 12:35:31 +0000

As we move towards the 2008 U.S. Presidential election, we’re going to hear more and more about the loss of manufacturing jobs. This is important – folk have to be able to eat. However, what the politicians aren’t talking about is the fundamental transformation going on in manufacturing and how that will impact citizens. That is important too. Manufacturing as we know it is going away – the notion that we can just “keep jobs here” is naive at best. To put this into context, let’s first reflect on what the word manufacturing means:

Manufacturing (from Latin manu factura, “making by hand”) is the use of tools and labor to make things for use or sale. The term may refer to a vast range of human activity, from handicraft to high tech, but is most commonly applied to industrial production, in which raw materials are transformed into finished goods on a large scale.

Wikipedia

Notice manu as in manual – this definition is in need of an upgrade since so much of what we call manufacturing doesn’t require human hands touching materials. One could argue that that has been true for a century, that we’re actually at Manufacturing 7.0 but I’ll stick with current terminology. Manufacturing 2.0 is a transition phase that will bring dematerialization to the forefront. reBang’s excellent Next Generation of Product Development Tools series is loaded with videos that illustrate how this is happening.

The word “sampling” is probably most often associated with music, but it’s not at all limited to that application. Physical models are sometimes sculpted and their shape digitally sampled, or a previously existing reference might be digitized and used as a scaffold for building a new, virtual model. Or something entirely unrelated can be sampled and turned into a virtual 3D model. Once digitized, there’s not much that can’t be done with digitally sampled information.
reBang: Next Generation Product Development Tools, Part 6

This kind of sampling is at the heart of Manufacturing 2.0 and represents a key aspect of Rhythmeering. When Manufacturing 3.0 arrives on the wings of robotics and nanotechnology, man-made items will be works of art and hobby – there won’t be many of today’s manufacturing jobs here or overseas. Sampling and mashups will be important elements of the new industrial base. The government needs to start informing the people and preparing for this future now.

Rhythmeering: Assessing the State of Rapid Manufacturing

Nanotech Virtual Machines

Laurence — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 10:48:14 +0000

Software used in today’s conventional milling machines is helping nanotech researchers make progress in nanomanufacturing:

The new technique suggests that the nanotechnology factories of the future might not operate so differently from existing manufacturing plants.

“If you can take prototyping and nanomanufacturing to a level that leverages what engineers know how to do, then you are ahead of the game,” Clark said. “Most engineers with conventional training don’t think about nanoscale manipulation. But if you want to leverage a workforce that’s already in place, how do you set up the future of manufacturing in a language that engineers already use to communicate? That’s what we’re focused on doing here.”

Duke News: Automation of Nanotech Manufacturing May Be Ahead

This should prove to be very helpful because there’s no getting around the strange and often counter-intuitive aspects of the nanoscale realm where thermal and quantum fluctuations make moving molecules from place to place like walking in a hurricane. Similar to the proven patterns used in software virtual machines, the Duke researchers are abstracting out the unfamiliar/counter-intuitive and substituting the more familiar. This is yet another sign of dematerialization and virtualization so I expect it will bear fruit.

Assessing The State of Rapid Manufacturing

Laurence — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 06:39:48 +0000

In a nutshell, “rapid manufacturing” is poised for an unprecedented explosion of growth in the next 3 to 5 years. To see why this potential exists, it’s necessary to examine a broad set of shaping factors. If only a single segment is explored, significant growth looks to be much further out but when one takes into account the converging sources of influences and innovation at work, a different perspective emerges. in this regard it is helpful to examine some other patterns of technology evolution.
Initially PC’s were no match for mainframes when it came to raw processing power, but their accessibility(price and learning curve) enabled people to do things they simply couldn’t do before. In the process, people pushed the limits of PC’s and accelerated the demand for reducing their limits. They also at the same transformed the design and operation of mainframes – Linux and Java are significant contributors to renewed interest in mainframes. During the early days of PC’s many people didn’t see the potential for rapid growth because PC database programs could only manage a fraction of the data that mainframes did. These skeptics didn’t realize that departments and groups within departments did not need the capacity of a mainframe for many important tasks. They didn’t recognize how big an impact spreadsheets would have or what it would mean to empower thousands of developers previously unable to create solutions because they couldn’t afford the necessary equipment. A similar pattern unfolded for the web, although desktop publishing is probably more relevant to the subject of desktop manufacturing.
I found via reBang to an excellent, but narrowly focused review of a Design News feature on Rapid Manufacturing’s Role in the Factory of the Future. The discussion is valuable but assumes that traditional high production volume factories will continue to dominate the manufacturing landscape forever and ignores overlapping influences. Like mainframes and printing presses, high production volume factories will be with us for a long time, their fall from dominance will happen faster then most people think and they will be significantly transformed by the emerging paradigm. How will this happen? Services such as Xardas and Ponoko are starting to give people the very powerful experience of “holding ideas in their hands” and providing engineers with insights into new forms of fabrication. With 3D printer prices dropping into the consumer electronics range, the number of people and organizations able to fabricate goods from their computers will grow rapidly. Architects, landscapers and engineering entrepreneurs will find immediate uses for these but many folks especially those lacking professional design and manufacturing experience will be frustrated. Parts will break or won’t come out right, but through Supplier Source and other online sources connections to professionals will be found. It’s not hard to envision Google figuring out a fabrication tie-in to it’s 3D Warehouse. All of this activity will expand the base of experiences and provide valuable feedback for engineers and designers. It will also drive demand for higher end 3D fabrication machines, as well as CNC machines.

At some point I expect that Fed-Ex/Kinkos will probably throw their hat in the ring and some distributed manufacturing network startup will have a huge IPO. Perhaps more significantly, a new type of product or service that hasn’t been thought of yet will emerge(think Lotus 1-2-3 or Amazon). One source in the Design News article put the widespread use of direct digital manufacturing 20 years out but by then nanotechnology will have already started having a significant impact. Desktop manufacturing is being driven by exponentially growing factors it’s just always hard to see it in the early stages. I think Ray Kurzweil has it exactly right

Although technology grows in the exponential domain, we humans live in a linear world. So technological trends are not noticed as small levels of technological power are doubled. Then seemingly out of nowhere, a technology explodes into view. For example, when the Internet went from 20,000 to 80,000 nodes over a two year period during the 1980s, this progress remained hidden from the general public. A decade later, when it went from 20 million to 80 million nodes in the same amount of time, the impact was rather conspicuous.

Ray Kurzweil: The Law of Accelerating Returns

Water and Ice

Laurence — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 02:35:33 +0000

In The Roots of Hardware and elsewhere, I’ve spoken about the software-hardware relationship from a bird’s-eye view, but it can be helpful to zoom in a bit to see what’s important about the relationship. Ice and water are made of the same chemical compound – H2O, but in different states. One could cook or wash with ice cubes but things won’t work out as well as with water. Similarly, it would be ineffective to store perishable food in water. Hardware and software are both made from the same mathematical elements – boolean logic, but in different states. Hardware is fast but inflexible. Software has unlimited flexibility but runs more slowly. It wouldn’t be wise to program a payroll system into hardware because requirements can change. 3D graphics software without hardware assistance runs very slowly. I should note that a short but very powerful book – The Pattern on the Stone demystifies computers making it possible for anyone, regardless of technical background/aptitude to understand the basic inner workings of computing.

In our bodies ice is non-existent. Throughout the ecosystems we typically frequent each day, liquid water is more abundant and useful than ice. The same should be true of software and hardware but today’s hardware dominates the information ecosystem. This prematurely crystallized software frequently serves as an impediment to innovation.

Hardware is really just software crystallized early. It is there to make program schemes run as efficiently as possible. But far too often the hardware has been presented as a given and it is up to software designers to make it appear reasonable. This has caused low-level techniques and excessive optimization to hold back progress in program design. … In short, most hardware designs today are just re-optimizations of moribund architectures.

Alan Kay: The Early History of Smalltalk

The software that best serves human interests needs to change rapidly. From individuals to Google, new code shows up on the Internet daily, but the pace of innovation is throttled by the slower changes in operating systems which in turn are constrained by horribly inflexible hardware designed independently of the software. We are not confined to speculation regarding alternatives since as far back as 1961, Burroughs computers provided competitive, software driven hardware architectures:

The B5000 was revolutionary at the time in that the architecture and instruction set were designed with the needs of software taken into consideration. This was a large departure from the computer system design of the time, where a processor and its instruction set would be designed and then handed over to the software people.

Wikipedia: Burroughs Large Systems

While it never dominated the marketplace(a topic for another entry), this architecture remains viable and competitive within it’s niche to this day with the Unisys ClearPath mainframe computers. In addition, the B5000 influenced the emergence of the personal computer at Xerox in 70′s, inspiring a much more fluid, organic approach to systems architecture:

Instead of trying to build the complex artifacts from
scratch—like trying to build living things cell by cell—many of
the most important projects built a kernel that could grow the artifact as new knowledge was gained—that is: get one cell’s DNA in good shape and let it help grow the whole system.

For example: Chuck’s beautiful and parsimonious architecture
for the Alto allowed most functions that were normally frozen in hardware to be re-microcoded at will as new ideas came forth, without requiring the low-level HW to be redesigned and built.

Alan Kay: The Power of the Context(emphasis mine)

The chips that have and continue to power PCs are general purpose devices whose capabilities are etched in silicon and cannot be modified to address new needs. Traditionally, the rationale for this has been economic. Chips are expensive to design and fabricate so they have to serve a broad spectrum of needs in order for vendors to be able to produce a large enough volume to recoup development costs. For many products where requirements can be predetermined, application-specific chips(ASIC) offer higher performance and/or lower cost. However, ASICs are just as inflexible as general purpose chips. Moreover, this economic rationale represents stale, industrial era thought. It overlooks the high costs of brittle designs, longer production introduction times, less engaging products and lost opportunities, Fortunately, change is underway. After 20 years more flexible hardware such as the Field Programmable Gate Array(FPGA) is finding it’s way into broader use. The capabilities of an FPGA chip can be modified after its creation to meet new needs. Previously FPGA usage tended to focus on very specific kinds of tasks but more general purpose applications have been emerging. One approach is a hybrid design in which FPGAs work in tandem with general purpose chips. Cray’s XD1 supercomputer was:

Designed from the outset to incorporate the FPGAs, the Cray XD1 system tightly integrates FPGAs through hardware, operating system and communications management software.

Application Acceleration with FPGA-based Reconfigurable Computing

Similarly, Intel competitor AMD’s Opteron chips can be customized with FPGA co-processors. This shift is a good one but more is needed for individuals, organizations and society at large faced with the challenges of the emerging meshverse. For a human-centric future, we need more software and less hardware – the Machine should be like us – lots of water, no ice.