Taiwanese semiconductor manufacturer ASE has unveiled plans for a 5G mmWave NR-DC SA smart factory that will be part of the company’s strategy of manufacturing digital transformation through 5G wireless infrastructure integration. The new factory will be supported by Taiwan’s Industrial Development Bureau and Qualcomm Technologies. Development will be through a collaboration including the Institute for Information Technology, Asia Pacific Telecom, DEVCORE Security and the Intelligent Manufacturing Research Centre at the National Cheng Kung University.

To counter the human talent crunch and adapt to diverse customer requirements, ASE is accelerating its adoption of smart manufacturing technologies including automation, and the integration of OT security to increase the efficiency of its equipment and productivity. In line with the company’s vision of building advanced smart factories, ASE is partnering with industry players, and government, academic and research institutions in converging AI applications with 5G technologies.

The collaboration will focus on enabling the digital transformation of factory processes that are highly secured and highly reliable through facilitating 5G wireless infrastructure integration, smart heterogeneous equipment integration and OT security system integration.

One area that the new smart factory development will focus on is AI-enabled detection of abnormalities from the SOP (standard operating process) that will improve the ability of operators and maintenance personnel to ensure consistent yield quality and a safe operating environment. Another is enhancing productivity and yield improvement through data analysis of current and newly purchased equipment in operation, and optimising model parameters. The new smart factory will also incorporate intelligent material handling solutions that enable real-time inventory forecasting to delivery that result in overall reduction of production cycle time.

The factory will also incorporate technology to generate high-resolution AOI images in real-time with the help of high bandwidth mobile streaming, to improve accuracy and efficiency of quality inspection. The new factory will also feature 5G mmWave NR-DC SA technology to provide network stability and speed to improve connectivity and in case of a machine re-layout, the reduction of set up time will also improve the overall equipment efficiency (OEE). This will be complemented by OT security technology to ensure the reliability, security and functionality of machines and tasks in a digitised manufacturing environment.

The smart factory will employ the Snapdragon X65 5G Modem-RF System and 5G NR-DC software with uplink four-component carrier aggregation (UL 4CC CA), in which four contiguous carriers of 100MHz are combined together with 2.6GHz (mid-band) and 28GHz (high-band), to achieve an uplink speed of 600Mbps. The low latency and higher data speeds are critical to semiconductor manufacturing environments for advanced processes and will in turn accelerate the application and development of smart manufacturing.

‘The success of Taiwan’s semiconductor industry and its importance in the global supply chain are the results of many factors, of which strategic initiatives led by the Economic Ministry have laid a strong foundation for the industry to grow and prosper. At ASE, partnerships are key to advancing our competitiveness and seizing new opportunities across diverse disciplines, generations and global borders. To that end, we are collaborating with the best-in-class from the government, industry, academia and research institutions to craft a 5G smart manufacturing blueprint that optimises technologies in 5G mmWave NR-DC SA, and establishes an open platform with integrated software/hardware and smart systems.’ said Mr Tien Wu, CEO, ASE Inc.

‘As a global leader in 5G technology, we believe that the next step in the 5G evolution is to move towards standalone mode and allow for industry growth in areas such as Industrial IoT and cloud services. This announcement again illustrates the importance of Taiwan’s comprehensive ICT supply chain and its technological advantages, so as how Qualcomm Technologies has always attached great value to Taiwan’s industry and ecosystem. We are excited to take part in driving the much needed development of technologies in a transforming industry. We will continue to support Taiwan’s development of mmWave technology and work together to strengthen Taiwan’s 5G ecosystem.’ said Mr ST Liew, Vice President, QUALCOMM CDMA Technologies Asia-Pacific Pte Ltd.

‘Asia Pacific Telecom is committed to technological innovation and the development of the 5G industry. Our strengths in integrating 5G enterprise private networks and vertical applications have led to the completion of Taiwan’s first 5G NR-DC SA network with Ericsson and Qualcomm Technologies. The network architecture in the mid-to-high frequency band offers excellent data speeds with extremely low latency, creating a more flexible, intelligent, secure and reliable environment to build a 5G mmWave NR-DC SA smart factory. We are proud to establish the next milestone in the application of 5G enterprise networks and participate in accelerating Taiwan’s industry upgrade.’ said Mr Peng Chen, Chairman and General Manager, Asia Pacific Telecom.