Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1101604
10 DESIGN007 MAGAZINE I APRIL 2019 Feature by Patrick McGoff and David Wiens MENTOR, A SIEMENS BUSINESS Almost all of the conversation regarding In- dustry 4.0 is centered on the manufacturing floor, which is where the effect of the initiative is most felt initially. Little attention is given to the starting data for manufacturing—the data that comes from design. However, you can't have smart manufacturing if your process be - gins with dumb data. As Pink Floyd said, "You can't have your pudding if you don't eat your meat!" Industry 4.0 starts with smart data. Smart data means a com - plete dataset with intelligence embedded within it. Wikipedia defines Industry 4.0 as "a name given to the current trend of automation and data exchange in manufacturing technologies." Data exchange is a pillar of In- dustry 4.0. If the data can't be computed, exchanged, and interpreted au- tomatically, inputs must be in- terpreted by humans to deter- mine how to process the job. Smart data allows automat- ed processing from design for manufacturing (DFM) and design for test (DFT) to stencil gen- eration, surface-mount technology (SMT), and test programming. It's as simple as an if/then statement: if this condition exists, then take that action. If the system doesn't know what this data represents, then it can't do anything with it automatically. Digitalization of the PCB manufacturing product model is smart data. It defines the PCB to be manufactured; and in so doing, it also defines the manufacturing processes required (Figure 1). The PCB design process evolves the Figure 1: Smart data enables seamless collaboration from product requirements through manufacturing, across multiple domains.