A quick look around practices at home, in Europe and further afield finds the concept of manufacture and its factories is partially moving into a 'soft' brainware approach and partly automating through a virtual vision, as the expected ubiquitous printer is anticipated to become the world's future major manufacturing tool, it would be too bad if Scotland missed that boat, though happily Glasgow seems to have its manufacturing head screwed on.

Take Compound Semiconductor Technologies Ltd (CSTG ) the ‘pure play’ semiconductor foundry located (right) at West of Scotland Science Park Kelvin Campus, (a stsone's through from Clyde Space with its cubesats). CSTG specialises in design, development and manufacture of discrete and integrated III-V electronic devices, processing 2, 3 and 4-inch wafers to provide a fully customised chip on submount service to a variety of markets around the world. Clients in the communications, defence, medical, energy and industrial sensing markets, and it exports 90% of it’s product to a world wide customer base.

Back in May it won research funding into compound semiconductor laser products for the next generation of high speed broadband access devices from the Technology Strategy Board (TSB), which invested £1m to help companies carry out initial research to ultimately lead to the introduction of internet access technology with speeds up to 10Gb/s.

 CST Global with IQE the chip foundry as partner, have been collaborating on development of high spec diode laser components for such applications and have been awarded three feasibility studies in a parallel approach to look at low cost laser sources for uncooled, high speed, extended reach, Fibre To The Home (FTTH) applications using aluminium- indium-gallium-arsenide (AlInGaAs) laser products.

More recently, CSTG has received a further $6m funding boost, where $3.4m will be devoted to expanding its capabilities through the purchase of new equipment and new technology.

Totally more 'new' soft vision, is the Glasgow Project Factory started by (left) Steve Boyle, (CEO of 'auld alliance' French management and technology consultants Altran). From a landmark office tower in the Glasgow suburb of Stepps, based on software of Boyle’s devising, an Altran’s system designed as a virtual back-office works on some 300 to 400 large and small projects in telecoms, aerospace, defence, financial services and construction for about 14 firms worldwide, and employing around 14 people.

Customers pay as little as £400, or as much as £80,000 a month for tailored services, from light supervision of a minor project to major logistical upheaval like the relocation of a financial institution’s data-centre.

Boyle hopes that the Project Factory will eventually employ 200 people. His system was first devised with financial services firms in mind. But he believes its applications are much wider. “We have proved the concept as a generic service, not financial service specific, and there is significant appetite for it outside that sector,” he says. “We also want to prove that the pay-per-use model can be used for small and large companies, so early projects have been small players.... A universal offering that fits many scales of project, if that gets proven, we have unlimited ability to deliver.”

The system is based on “Zero trust.” The computer requires verification of each completed stage and until it gets it, actively prevents any diversionary progress elsewhere, of the sort that hides failures until it is too late to mitigate their knock-on effects. That prevents the accumulating slippage that bedevils so many complex projects.

Software takes the strain of the complexity, offsetting the human tendency for people to say what bosses want to hear in PowerPoint progress reports. Boyle neatly dubs PowerPoint " a tool for claiming that red is a shade of green.”

Boyle stresses that he is running a global-facing business that happens to have its “back office” in Glasgow. His focus is not  Scottish projects but world wide. But there are major Scottish challenges in the new Forth Road Bridge, the Commonwealth Games, the Lockerbie “cloud computing” data-centre, issues where an early injection of Project Factory discipline could indeed deliver on time, in budget, good, cost effective and valuable innovation.

Australia teamed with Cambridge
If that seems to be just a quirky approach to project management rather than manufacturing, worth looking at the Australian Project Factory which is taking an intriguingly analytic approach to 'games' like cricket as a database and proposes the intermesh of several disciplines.

The Project Factory is a 'lights on always' operation based in Sydney (Australia) and Cambridge (UK) for excellent projects to a top level of quality on time and on budget dedicated to producing world-class engaging and commercially attractive interactive content.

Annette Parry (left) with a decade of telecoms and new media runs the operations.  “Having a website” is no longer enough to compete in the current marketplace."

This Project Factory creates transition strategies for new audiences, business models and revenue streams for medium to large enterprises for online, mobile, social media, virtual world and interactive entertainment strategies.

"We have yet to be parachuted into a warzone to build a digital media project but would not have a problem with it as long as the project is interesting enough."

Project Factory here morphs the engine (right). For a games focused country like  Scotland, perhaps a well equipped, virtual factory approach would be as good as any way to encourage IP development, "manufacture" and export.

Germany takes a leaf, but is ahead in virtual for reality.
Like Scotland, sectors of Germany have suffered the exodus of heavy duty silicon manufacturing emphasised when Dresden, the home of AMD  and the silicon 300mm wafers, recently saw Qimonda go bankrupt and Global Foundries (formerly AMD) opt for a New York fab 2. In 2007, the number of people employed in the semiconductor industry there had more than doubled form 21,000 in 2002 to peak time 43,000.

Interestingly through Blue Wonder Communications, Dresden is adopting the CSGT strategy, that encourages a chip design research approach for technology focused on wireless technology, and reality backed up by the existing Global Foundries former AMD fab 1 in Dresden.

But in Europe, that reservoir of talent, the Fraunhofer Institute is also hunting the virtual factory, and when it comes to the future factory, it pays to watch. The Fraunhofer Institute for Factory Operation and Automation IFF  focused R&D development on the fields of virtual engineering, logistics, material handling, engineering, automation and plant engineering.

In the field of virtual technologies, it develops solutions for every stage in the process chain with its Virtual Development and Training Centre specialist know-how and high-tech equipment, providing integrated digital products from the initial idea to development, production and sales up through startup and operation.

Work uses virtual engineering as the template for development of products, processes and systems, on varieties of FEM calculation, for virtual factory layout and assembly planning, on qualification and basic and advanced occupational training and on the creation of virtual-interactive manuals, spare parts catalogs and product documentation.

No surprise then is its really clever Multitouch-Table (left) for interaction in and with virtual environments. Sized 150x90cm with an optical method used to track users' finger, a camera observes the table surface and VisionLib software tracks the fingers movement. Using multitouch input and 3D data visualisation allows the user to touch and interact with 3D content, so Touchtable become a unique tool for presentation and explanation of advanced procesess in the value chain of plant engineering,construction and others. Selected plant elements can be rotated and observed at close range offering amazing planning insight.

For straight, bright thinking, a broken cable or soiled connector can easily cause factory machines (or bank computers) to break down and hours elapse to pinpoint the problem. How about using energy self-suffficient sensor actuator systems? Comprising sensor, a processor and radio module, these measure position, force or temperature and transmit data instantaneously. An EnAs project with Fraunhofer Technology Development Group with industrial partners is to build a transportable demonstrator.

This is a miniature conveyer system.
(Photo: Festo, courtesy FEG) driven by compressed air that transports small components. Sensing elements have no need of an external power supply. The machine uses photo diodes to check the carrier has been correctly loaded – if so, the light from the diodes is obscured by the workpieces. Solar cells supply energy for the workpiece detector.  Pressure sensors which monitor the work of the vacuum gripper have power supplied by piezoelectric flexural transducers.

The piezoelectric elements' ceramics generate electricity on being deformed. Deformation happens when the vacuum pump is switched on and off.  Electricity generated is sufficient to send an OK signal to the central control unit. The sensor thus draws its power from pressurised air that is present anyway. Within the next two years, the various system components are expected to make their way into everyday industrial use.

And from the US printed glass
Engineers and artists working at the University of Washington's Solheim Rapid Manufacturing Laboratory have developed a way to create glass objects using a conventional 3-D printer. The technique allows a new type of material to be used in such devices. The team's method, which it named the Vitraglyphic process, is a follow-up to the Solheim Lab's success last spring printing with ceramics.

"It became clear that if we could get a material into powder form at about 20 microns we could print just about anything," said Mark Ganter, a UW professor of mechanical engineering and co-director of the Solheim Lab.

Three-dimensional printers are used as a cheap, fast way to build prototype parts. In a typical powder-based 3-D printing system, a thin layer of powder is spread over a platform and software directs an inkjet printer to deposit droplets of binder solution only where needed. The binder reacts with the powder to bind the particles together and create a 3-D object.

But glass powder doesn't readily absorb liquid, however, so the approach used with ceramic printing had to be radically altered. "We had to reformulate our approach for both powder and binder."said mechanical engineering graduate student Grant Marchelli.

(Left: two caged grass spheres) By adjusting the ratio of powder to liquid the team found a way to build solid parts out of powdered glass purchased from Spectrum Glass in Woodinville, Wash. Their successful formulation held together and fused when heated to the required temperature.

Glass is a material that can be transparent or opaque, but is distinguished as an inorganic material (which contains no carbon) that solidifies from a molten state without the molecules forming an ordered crystalline structure. Glass molecules remain in a disordered state, so glass is technically a super-cooled liquid rather than a true solid.

In an instance of new technology rediscovering and building on the past, Ganter (right) points out that 3-D printed glass bears remarkable similarities to pate de verre, a technique for creating glassware. In pate de verre, glass powder is mixed with a binding material such as egg white or enamel, placed in a mold and fired. The technique dates from early Egyptian times. With 3-D printing the technique takes on a modern twist.

As with its ceramics 3-D printing recipe, the Solheim lab is releasing its method of printing glass for general use. "By publishing these recipes without proprietary claims, we hope to encourage further experimentation and innovation within artistic and design communities," said Duane Storti, a UW associate professor of mechanical engineering and co-director of the Solheim Lab.

Artist Meghan Trainor, a graduate student in the UW's Center for Digital Arts and Experimental Media working at the Solheim Lab, was the first to use the new method to produce objects. "Creating kiln-fired glass objects from digital models gives my ideas an immediate material permanence... a key factor in my explorations of digital art forms," she said. "Moving from idea to design to printed part in such a short period of time creates an engaging iterative process where the glass objects form part of a tactile feedback loop."

Ronald Rael, an assistant professor of architecture at University of California, Berkeley, has been working with the Solheim Lab to set up his own 3-D printer. He is now working on new kinds of ceramic bricks that can be used for evaporative cooling systems.

"3-D printing in glass has huge potential for changing the thinking about applications of glass in architecture," he said. "There was no good method of rapid prototyping in glass, so testing designs was an expensive, time-consuming process," adding that 3-D printing allows the insertion of different forms of glass to change the performance of the material at specific positions as required by the design.

The new method would also create a way to repurpose used glass for new functions, Ganter said seeing recycled glass as a low-cost material that can help bring 3-D printing within the budget of a broader community of artists and designers.

Seems that factories and manufacturing in future may be simply labs, or workshops, giving a totally new take on the concept of cottage industries.