Professor Goran Roos

Professor Goran Roos

As well as being the Thinker in Residence for South Australia, Professor Goran Roos is considered one of the 20 most significant thinkers of the 21st Century. This morning he was presenting his views on Australian Manufacturing to a combined breakfast meeting of the South East Business Network and SEMMA.

So what did I learn?

Here is the short list on what manufacturing does for an economy:

• R&D is driven by it
• Innovation is primarily manufacturing related
• Value added exports are usually manufactured
• Creates more indirect jobs per direct job than other sectors
• Many service companies have a manufacturing core
• Is the fastest knowledge growth domain
• Is essential for a highly competitive economy

His primary point is that “A healthy manufacturing sector is a must for any advanced economy with ambitions to maintain both economic and social wellbeing“.

Now he has my attention big time. Because this is something I have inherently believed my entire working life. Australia needs manufacturing.

Manufacturing creates employment

Next  he looked at the contribution of manufacturing to employment and why we have employment issues in Australia. Yes I know the official unemployment figure is low, but that is because many people looking for work are not included in the official figure. So here is how is pans out for employment:

• For each manufacturing job, there are 2.5 other jobs created around it
• In Australia where there are 1 million jobs in manufacturing, that means there are 3.5 million jobs in total associated with manufacturing
• For each working person, there is a dependent person relying on them for income. These can be relatives, children, spouse etc.
• So in total there are 7 million people in Australia dependent on manufacturing

Now lets look at mining:

• For each mining job, there is another job created around it
• In Australia where there are 200 thousand jobs in mining, that means there are 400 thousand jobs in total associated with mining
• For each working person, there is a dependent person relying on them for income. These can be relatives, children, spouse etc.
• So in total there are 400 thousand people in Australia dependent on mining

So the current government policies and industry practices of reducing manufacturing and increasing mining for direct export are actually economic suicide.

The service industry is even worse for indirect job creation though it does employ more people than mining ever will:

• For each service industry job, there is  0.5 jobs created around it
• The ABS statistics for 2010 show roughly 3 million people working in service industries in total including the 0.5 jobs created
• For each working person, there is a dependent person relying on them for income. These can be relatives, children, spouse etc.
• So in total there are 6 million people in Australia dependent on service industry jobs

What this means is that manufacturing is actually the most critical sector in Australia in terms of job creation and future prosperity.

So lose manufacturing, and you lose a huge number of jobs.

The USA has shed 5 million manufacturing jobs since 2000, primarily to offshoring manufacturing to lower cost economies. These jobs were replaced by low paying personal service jobs. The net result is record levels of unemployment and a trade deficit in every manufacturing category.

He also spoke of the hidden categories, particularly in industrial products, that lead to high export incomes and have been strength of many European Manufacturers. The following diagram shows the  attributes that make these products possible. Note that 4 are to do with knowledge, and 4 to do with structure and relationship. This implies you need both.

Invisible Middle Market

Economic Growth and Competitiveness

Economic growth is a measure of how well you have been doing up to now. It is a measure of the past performance. It applies to yesterday.

Competitiveness is a measure of how well you will keep doing. It is a measure of likely performance. It applies to tomorrow.

So it is more important for the future to be positioned to be competitive, than it is to have had past economic growth. Ideally you will have both.

Some examples of countries that are highly ranked for competitiveness and also economic growth are:

• China
• Singapore
• Switzerland
• Sweden
• Finland

That was a surprise.  Australia ranks at number 15 for competitiveness and growth according to this analysis. The red line is the frontier of highest competitiveness. Australia is a long way from it.

Future Economic Success

Innovation

Goran Roos also had an interesting take on innovation and this fits in nicely with the view of Edward De Bono on Creating Value. He defines 2 types of innovation that are required to address Australia’s lack of competitiveness:

• Innovate to create value
• Innovate to retain value

Based on this, offshoring is a really bad idea. It is only done to reduce overheads for cost based activities. For value based activities where we retain the value and the income from that value in Australia, we should be onshoring!

Knowledge

Manufacturing is the fastest knowledge growth domain. This is an interesting claim and one that had a case put for it to demonstrate the validity. Here is the case:

• Manufacturing generates 15 times the knowledge that mining does per unit of economic activity
• Manufacturing generates 3 times the knowledge that service industries do per unit of economic activity

Professor Goran Roos also pointed out that knowledge is like a race. If you slow down for a bit, then you can’t catch up if the other runners keep going full steam ahead.

Onshoring

It now makes sense that mining for export is not that great an option. Take something of huge potential value, and give it away at the lowest point you can in the value chain.

Onshoring means we pull value creating back in Australia so we get paid for it. And making stuff, and providing the service industries to support that should be our primary strategy for the future.

The other point Professor Goran Roos made is that Australia is not a scale based economy. We don’t have a large local market by world standards and so we should focus on product categories which do not require scale. Or in my language: lower volume, higher value add products. This is also know as Niche Electronics Manufacture.

Thinker in Residence

His speech on the future of South Australian manufacturing is also worth watching and listening too. Here it is:

All graphics are Copyright © Goran Roos 2011.

Successful Endeavours specialise in Electronics Design and Embedded Software Development. Ray Keefe has developed market leading electronics products in Australia for nearly 30 years.  This post is Copyright © 2011  Successful Endeavours Pty Ltd

Australian Synchrotron

I went to the open day for the Australian Synchrotron at the Monash Science Park on Sunday. As a member of SEMIP I already knew about the Australian Synchrotron but had never actually visited it. I am very glad I did.

Australian Synchrotron

On the open day I went to 2 sessions. The first was titled “Synchrotrons for Dummies” which was very well presented and gave a good overview of the Australian Synchrotron but more importantly, gave excellent examples of how it is used and what it can be used for.  Here is a short list from one of their brochures, by no means exhaustive:

• Improving fertility
• Examining forensic evidence
• Helping premature babies breathe without getting lung damage
• Improving energy storage
• Improving industrial processes
• Nano-scale material science
• Improving cement

The Australian Synchrotron uses very high energy electrons to create electromagnetic radiation that can be used to either select specific frequencies for analysing, or for getting access to much higher energy or finer resolution imaging. It runs 24 hours a day when in operation and multiple experiments can be run at the same time on what they refer to as Beamlines. Each Beamline can run in parallel with the others as they are independent. The higher energy allows better penetration and the finer resolution which means you can go down to features comparable to a single molecule. So you can think of it as either:

• A very bright light (1 million time brighter than the sun before you filter it back to what you want)
• A very high resolution microscope
• A very high resolution and finely tuned X-Ray imaging system

The Australian Synchrotron website has an excellent set of explanations including How the Synchrotron Works.

Synchrotron Science

The second session was on Synchrotron Science and included a detailed guided tour through the entire complex starting from the electron gun where the initial 90KeV electrons are generated then into the booster ring where the energy is kicked up by a factor of over 30,000 and finally through to the main storage ring where they are circulating at 3GeV energy and as close to the speed of light as we know how to make them.  In fact, they are going so fast that adding more energy makes them heavier just as Einstein predicted. The energy and the equipment involved are staggering. I was reading the individual steering magnet ratings and they are water cooled 6KW devices. And there are hundreds of them, all colour coded according to their specific function.

Australian Synchrotron Science

The guided tour included both a detailed up close view of the equipment and also a trip over the top to see the complex from above.  The entire device is the size of a football oval.

Australian Synchrotron Science Valves

Beam Time

And the commercial arrangements are very attractive. If you have a great idea for a project and it meets the selection criteria, it costs you nothing. If not, you can rent Beam Time as they call it for $400 per hour and usually get a slot within 8 weeks. Given that this is a $300M device, that is an absolute bargain.

Australian Synchrotron Open Day

Now I am thinking about what my clients might be able to do with this amazing facility.

Successful Endeavours specialise in Electronics Design and Embedded Software Development. Ray Keefe has developed market leading electronics products in Australia for nearly 30 years.  This post is Copyright © 2011  Successful Endeavours Pty Ltd

Dennis Ritchie: farewell and thank you

With the recent passing of Steve Jobs, the world has had a reason to reflect on the significant impact some people have. Someone who made everything Steve Jobs did possible also passed away recently. On the 12 October 2011, Dennis Ritchie, the father of The C Programming Language, died at his home in Berkley Heights, New Jersey.

Beginning in 1970 and with the help of Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie began the design and construction of a new programming language. It was based on a language developed by Ken Thompson dubbed B. So the next language was called C. And the reason they wanted to create a new language? They wanted to write the kernel for the powerful multi-user operating system UNIX. that was to replace MULTICS which Bell Labs were ending their involvement with in 1969, the same year man first stepped on the moon. And in doing so, Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson created the framework on which all our modern computer and communications infrastructure are based.

Dennis Ritchie

The C Programming Language

The importance of The C Programming Language cannot be underestimated. Not only did it make UNIX possible, but it made UNIX possible on multiple computing platforms. It was also the foundation for higher level languages such as C++ and Java as well as most of the core infrastructure of the Internet is based on programs written in C.

A few additional reasons why C is so important:

• Microsoft used it to create their initial software offerings
• UNIX is the origin for OSX and iOS
• 80% of all embedded software is still written in C
• Our business writes the Embedded Software we create in C

The C programming language, Brian Kernighan & Dennis Ritchie

The C Programming Language, Brian Kernighan & Dennis Ritchie, was the language manual for C and was so well written that it made picking up the language easy and was one of the reasons for the rapid uptake of the language.

So much of our modern world depends on the work of Dennis Ritchie. And I along with many others are grateful. He may not have been the public figure that Steve Jobs was, but he is leaving a larger and more enduring legacy.

Here are some further accolades for Dennis Ritchie:

• Without Dennis Ritchie there would be no Jobs
• Dennis Ritchie: The Shoulders Jobs Stood On
• Dennis Ritchie, The Father Of C And C0-Developer of UNIX
• Father Of C And UNIX, Dennis Ritchie
• Dennis Ritchie, Computer-Programming Pioneer
• Dennis Ritchie, Trailblazer
• What we can learn from Dennis Ritchie
• Dennis Ritchie: the other man inside your iPhone
• Dennis Ritchie: Remembering another Computing Genius
• Dennis Ritchie Biography
• Dennis Ritchie Bell Labs

And finally the 1998 USA National Medal for Science and Technology received by Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson for their creation of the UNIX operating system and The C Programming Language.

And Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie explain what was behind the development of the UNIX operating system

We stand on the shoulders of giants. And Dennis Ritchie was a giant amongst giants.

Ray Keefe has been developing high quality and market leading electronics products in Australia for nearly 30 years.  For more information go to his LinkedIn profile at Ray Keefe. This post is Copyright © 2011  Successful Endeavours Pty Ltd

How Green is my iPhone?

Have you ever wondered just how green an iPhone really is?

Well today’s blog post was sent to me by Dr Marc Dussault, The Exponential Growth Strategist. It’s an Infographic taken from DailyInfographic.com. At Successful Endeavours, we’re always interested in recycling and sustainable technologies and solutions. You will have seen some of that is past posts on how to be greener with the Electronics Design including Electronics Design for Green Manufacture? , Green Electronics Strategies – Reduce Power While Awake and Green Electronics Strategies – Sleep Saves Energy .

For this post we will use the infographic to specifically look at how GREEN the iPhone 4 is versus the iPhone 3G from the perspective of the production, use and disposal of the phone.  Some key figures I noted or calculated are:

• Production Emissions are 57% of all emissions in the iPhone 4 product lifecycle
• 58.9% of the weight of the iPhone 4 is in materials that are easily recycled
• Packaging Reductions save 14% in transport fuel

The Packaging Reductions are an excellent example of simple things we can all do to save on emissions. And Apple offer a full recycling service that is aimed at being environmentally friendly which is also a great thing to put in place.

Electronics Manufacturing Energy

The area that stands out for me is the energy that is consumed in production of the iPhone 4. This is not an iPhone 4 specific problem but a general problem for Electronics Manufacture. If we want to talk about Green Electronics, then this has to include not just the product we use and the Electronics Waste and Recycling / WEEE, but we also have to get to the point where the Production Emissions, the energy to produce a product, is way less than the energy to use the product. This is a huge issue for Battery Operated Products, such as the emerging Electric Vehicle market, where the Production Emissions for just the battery can be close to half of all the Production Emissions.

Enjoy the infographic from the dailyinfographic Keeping it Green.

How Green is the iPhone 4

Ray Keefe has been developing high quality and market leading electronics products in Australia for nearly 30 years.  For more information go to his LinkedIn profile at Ray Keefe. This post is Copyright © 2011  Successful Endeavours Pty Ltd

LED Lighting

10 years ago, LED Lighting was set to revolutionise the general illumination market. LEDs, also known as Light Emitting Diodes, had already taken over are the role as indicator panel illuminators and user interfaces on industrial, commercial and consumer products.  All the trend lines indicated that they would eclipse the incandescent light globe for cost per watt within a decade.

So what went wrong?

LED Lighting - Purple LED Diffused

More power without more light

As the technology was scaled up, the power levels rose and the expected requirements of more heatsinking were being dealt with and all seemed on track for LEDs to take over the world of lighting. But then a snag was hit. The technology got to a point where the efficiency dropped off as more current flowed through the diode. Companies like CREE, LumiLEDs and OSRAM pursued different and moderately successful strategies to try and overcome these limitations but the pace of progress slowed dramatically.

All of this points to a technical barrier we still don’t fully understand but are chipping away at.

Same light less cost

The other issue is the cost per watt in terms of the manufacturing cost of LEDs. The manufacturing process typically uses Sapphire or Silicon Carbide substrated which makes LEDs more expensive to manufacture than conventional semiconductors.  There are several ways to improve this and they are all being pursued in parallel.

The first is the move toward organic semiconductors as covered in my recent post on Printed Electronics I looked at much lower cost techniques for making semiconductors and organic LEDs are one of the possible end products from these techniques. The CSIRO are world leaders in these technologies and are actively pursuing research into flexible electronics including organic displays and lighting. Here the challenge is creating a robust manufacturing technique that produces high volume, low cost lighting. The efficiency may not be as high but the cost per watt is much lower. Organic Semiconductors and organic LEDs will continue to be part of the solution. You can read about their efforts in CSIRO Flexible Electronics.

CSIRO Flexible Electronics

The second move is toward reducing the costs of conventional LED manufacture by eliminating the more costly steps of the process. A recent breakthrough was announced by Bridgelux and reportied in IEEE Spectrum will permit the manufacture of LEDs on silicon substrates.  In Silicon Is Key to Quest for $5 LED Lightbulb the breakthrough is described and the promise is good. This also does not address the efficiency problem but again reduces the cost per watt.

Bridgelux Silicon Substrate LED

Efficiency is the final frontier

The final chapter is yet to be written because the breakthrough we have all hoped for has not yet arrived. In the meantime the problem is being tackled from many sides and advances are being made on multiple technical fronts. LED lighting is an important part of the strategy to reduce our Carbon Footprint.

Ray Keefe has been developing high quality and market leading electronics products in Australia for nearly 30 years.  For more information go to his LinkedIn profile at Ray Keefe. This post is Copyright © 2011  Successful Endeavours Pty Ltd.

Plastic Semiconductors

In a previous post on Printed Electronics we looked at new product opportunities that were being created using new fabrication techniques for semiconductors. But advances are also being made that benefit both conventional or new product concepts.  In The Plastic Processor we get an insight into how you can make a microprocessor using Organic Transistors on plastic film.

The steps look simple, as is often the case on the other side of Research and Development for a new concept:

• the substrate is a plastic film with similar mechanical properties to cling wrap
• print a layer of gold to make electrical connections
• place an plastic on top of that to make the dielectric
• print a layer of gold to make electrical connections
• the organic semiconductor goes on top

And the circuit is complete.  And at less than 10% of the cost of doing a similar process using Silicon.  And of course there are variations on that theme. And better approaches will be developed rapidly now that a first successful attempt has been made.

Organic Transistor

Of course there is still a lot of work to do on getting the reliability and reproducibility up to the levels we expect from Silicon Semiconductors but this is a significant step forward.

And in the latest news, The Plastic Processor, we get an insight into how you can make a microprocessor using Organic Transistors on plastic film. This is certainly getting more interesting quickly.

Ray Keefe has been developing high quality and market leading electronics products in Australia for nearly 30 years.  For more information go to his LinkedIn profile at Ray Keefe. This post is Copyright © 2011  Successful Endeavours Pty Ltd.

Printed Electronics – A New Roadmap

The direction of Printed Electronics has taken an interesting new turn with the focus being no longer only on reducing production cost. Now the electronics industry is looking at product ideas that were previously thought to be impossible.

Printed Electronics

Some examples from The Future Of Printed Electronics shows previously unanticipated applications such as:

• Nokia is developing Flexible Electronics that stretch
• Companies such as Novacentrix are developing methods to directly Print Copper
• Solar Cell electrode printing

The previously expected driver of Low Cost Electronics Manufacture is no longer the primary goal. Some of the above methods do reduce cost but the emerging trend is toward new product opportunities. This makes sense as markets tend to emerge and go through cycles until they are so commoditised that cost is the primary issue. We are at the beginning rather than the end of this cycle for Printed Electronics.

Printing of Organic Transistors and Organic PhotoVoltaic Solar Cells is still on the agenda so the market is diversifying in several interesting directions at the same time.

Ray Keefe has been developing high quality and market leading electronics products in Australia for nearly 30 years.  For more information go to his LinkedIn profile at Ray Keefe. This post is Copyright © 2011  Successful Endeavours Pty Ltd.

Carbon Nanotubes replace Solder Pads

Recent breakthroughs in nanotechnology could change the way Printed Circuit Boards, PCBs,  are made and this could start happening soon. If you either the Design PCBs or Manufacture PCBs then you will want to keep up with this new technology that uses Nanotape PCB Pads .

Here is a picture showing how the NanoTape structures differ from conventional Solder Pads. Although they look the same from the outside, the internal geometry shows the higher thermal and electrical conduction created by the Carbon Nanotubes. This can significantly help in product miniaturisation and for high power designs where both the enhanced thermal and electrical performance will improve the efficiency.

NanoTape replaces solder pads

Like all new technologies, there will be teething problems but this has the potential to overcome the Tin Whisker issues that plagued PCBs before the introduction of Lead to Solder and which have emerged again with the move to RoHS compliance and the use of Lead Free Solder.

Ray Keefe has been developing high quality and market leading electronics products in Australia for nearly 30 years.  For more information go to his LinkedIn profile at Ray Keefe. This post is Copyright © 2011  Successful Endeavours Pty Ltd.

Computer Bug Number 1

On 9th September 1947, while working on the Harvard University Mark II Aiken Relay Calculator, Grace Murray Hopper was having trouble getting the machine to work correctly. The calculator was a very simple computer using relay logic. Investigations revealed that a moth had become stuck between 2 of the relay points. After they “Debugged” the machine it worked correctly. And so the term Bug and Debugged became associated with computers.

First Computer Bug, 1947

As fate would have it, the report with the moth taped to it, remained in the Naval Surface Warfare Center Computer Museum at Dahlgren, Virginia, until in 1991, it made its way to the History of American Technology Museum, part of the Smithsonian.

The origin of Bugs

However this isn’t the first time the term ‘Bug‘ had been used in relation to technology.  In the time of Thomas Edison it meant any defect in an industrial apparatus and in Hawkin’s New Catechism of Electricity, an 1896 electrical handbook from Theo. Audel & Co, we find the entry:

The term “Bug” is used to a limited extent to designate any fault or trouble in the connections or working of electric apparatus.

So the application to computers was natural. These days, we mostly think of bugs as flaws in software programs since that is where we spend most of our time Debugging.

Edsger W. Dijkstra once said , “If Debugging is the process of removing Bugs, then Programming must be the process of putting them in”.

Ray Keefe has been developing high quality and market leading electronics products in Australia for nearly 30 years.  For more information go to his LinkedIn profile at Ray Keefe. This post is Copyright © 2011  Successful Endeavours Pty Ltd.

Paper Electronics Devices

Recent breakthroughs at Harvard Labs have led to the creation of a paper based accelerometer that matches the sensitivity of silicon based MEMS accelerometers so common in air bags and the Nintendo Wii system.

Paper Accelerometer Could Mean Disposable Devices

The full article can be read on the IEEE website at Paper Accelerometer Could Mean Disposable Devices.

There are two major problems with manufacturing silicon based sensors.  The first is the cost of the process itself and the second is the chemical waste and energy consumption.  So devices based on this new approach are not only cheaper to make but also have significant Environmental Benefits.

In Paper Electronics Set for Breakthrough we see other applications described such as batteries. So there are potential benefits for both consumers and Electronics Manufacturers from these new Paper Electronics technologies.

Ray Keefe has been developing high quality and market leading electronics products in Australia for nearly 30 years.  For more information go to his LinkedIn profile at Ray Keefe. This post is Copyright © 2011  Successful Endeavours Pty Ltd.