Demystifying the 5G application of electronic foundries

The industrial Internet track driven by 5G has been opened. On January 9, 2020, Li Junqi, Chairman of Foxconn Industrial Internet Co., Ltd., was elected as the "2019 Economic Person of the Year". His acceptance speech was: "Facing the future, creating a new ecology of intelligent manufacturing + industrial Internet platform to help the high-quality development of China's manufacturing industry is our goal and our social responsibility. On this road, we We must continue to explore and forge ahead."

????On January 8, Li Haihua, deputy director of the Institute of Industrial Internet and Internet of Things, China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, stated in Beijing that the industrial Internet industry has begun to take shape and is showing a steady growth trend. According to the comprehensive calculation of the Industrial Internet Industry Monitoring Platform, the industry will be The scale will reach 800 billion yuan, growing at an average annual growth rate of 18%.

????Ronan Dunne, executive vice president of Verizon in the United States and group president of Verizon Wireless, sees 5G as a key factor in triggering the fourth industrial revolution. He said: "Consider innovations such as printing presses, steam engines, railways, electricity, the Internet, etc." 5G has the potential to become one of these indispensable technologies, and has the potential to create growth and stimulate innovation on a truly global scale. "

????In a city in the 5G era, there is a base station every 5,000 meters. In the 5G era, how do smart factories realize the informatization and intelligence of factory governance? Recently, Rong Letian, chief marketing officer of 5G research from Foxconn Technology Group, introduced Foxconn's practice in this area. Gree's active exploration has also given good enlightenment to the industry.

Foxconn: 5G small base stations help smart factories

????Foxconn, as the world's largest foundry, Hon Hai Foxconn ranked 23rd in the 2019 list, one place ahead of 2018 (24th), and continues to rank first in the world's top 500 Chinese technology companies. Ranked 4th in the global ranking of technology companies (Apple, Amazon, Samsung Electronics, Hon Hai Foxconn).

According to the author, Foxconn Industrial Internet Co., Ltd. was listed on the A-share market on June 8, 2018. After listing, the company has established a development strategy of smart manufacturing + industrial Internet platform, and the company has also achieved brilliant results in smart manufacturing. In terms of industrial Internet platforms, Foxconn has taken the lead in the world to propose a professional cloud based on 30 years of manufacturing experience. Based on the "fog cerebellum" and professional cloud, the intelligent light-off factory built by Fii in Shenzhen won the world's Davos economy in 2019. The honorary title of the Forum's global lighthouse factory; it is also the realization of intelligent worry-free production. In 2019, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Review of the United States ranked Industrial Fortune as one of the world's 50 smartest companies.

????On January 11th, the World Economic Forum announced that the "Smart Factory for Flexible Assembly Operations" of Fii Industrial has been selected as seven new members of the "Manufacturing Beacon Factory" network, becoming a member of five of China's and sixteen of the world's industrial 4.0 future smart factories. Rong Letian pointed out that Foxconn has 80,000 robots, more than 170,000 CNCs, 1,600 SMT production lines, and the world's largest factory. Foxconn production lines account for 12% of the world's production lines. Foxconn* introduced the light-off factory concept as early as 5 years ago. In the factory environment, it is fully automatic 24 hours a day. Except for the signal lights, it is unattended. Foxconn promoted the practice of turning off the lights in 8 plant areas.

Rong Lotte said that Hon Hai Foxconn has 38 domestic factories and Shenzhen Longhua factory has 200,000 people. In 2018, the total revenue reached 1 trillion yuan. From 2000 to 2018, Hon Hai Foxconn's sales revenue increased by 50 times. .

????Foxconn is mainly engaged in the manufacture of electronic information products, especially precision manufacturing. It places high demands on the entire network and automation. Some production lines are fully automated. "According to our own calculations, Foxconn’s 90-10,000 square meters factory , The amount of data per day is about 7TB. Industrial cameras, temperature, pressure, humidity sensors, 4k cameras are widely used in Foxconn factories, quality monitoring has been done in place. Foxconn is introducing more cameras in large quantities, and There are some machine states that further strengthen the process flow. We hope to truly open up the flow of information, truly gather data together, do data analysis and machine intelligence on the basis of the PASS platform, and truly implement the industrial Internet.” Rong Letian said.

????Foxconn has established an industrial Internet strategy based on 6 streams and "cloud, mobile, material, large, intelligent, network + robots". At present, there are 80,000 robots deployed in different production lines in Foxconn's factory. In the future, it will continue to promote the strategic direction of the Industrial Internet of Things, and Foxconn will increase the number of robots to 200,000 units.

????Ao Li, director of the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, once told an electronic enthusiast reporter that the industrial level of enterprises across China is not uniform, and industrial transformation must shift from a single point of application of information technology to a comprehensive digital, networked and intelligent transformation. 5G has become an important technical support for the industrial Internet business. Professor Chen Changwen from the Chinese University of Hong Kong pointed out that industrial robots and drones require continuous connection and real-time data transmission. 5G networks will bring a great increase in data rate, and also in terms of latency and connection quality. Will bring a huge improvement. Obviously, Foxconn has seen the important role of 5G networks in the age of industrial Internet.

????Rong Letian believes that 5G plays the biggest role in the industrial Internet: it can collect a large amount of information and guide and provide services to remote robots. Second, it can provide a low-latency, high-speed closed loop, allowing people to remotely perform production on site even if they are not on the production site, even in a low-cost production place.

????Shenzhen, as one of the cities where 5G commercial advancement is relatively fast, has 5G applications in 8 districts of the city, with a total of 19 pilot areas. One of the pilot projects in Longhua District is Foxconn Intelligent Manufacturing. In September 2019, Foxconn launched a 5G small base station based on the Industrial Internet.

????Industry experts believe that because 5G outdoor coverage starts from mid-to-high frequency bands and has limited penetration, indoor coverage will become a new challenge. Special indoor coverage base stations are needed to solve the problem. In the early stage of 5G networking, 5G indoor coverage needs only Will appear, which means that the demand for small base stations will also be released quickly. Considering the flexible and diverse application and deployment scenarios of small base stations, adopting the networking mode of "macro base station as the main and small base station as the secondary" has been an important way for long-term network coverage.

????A 5G small base station is a 5G router, and 5G indoor coverage uses a small base station installed on the ceiling. Rong Letian pointed out that the industry now provides three indicators for 5G small base stations: large connection, high speed and low latency. What we are not focusing on is that reliable and stable wireless connections are *important.

????The difference between Foxconn's 5G small base stations and other manufacturers' small base stations lies in a deep understanding of the smart factory process. Ninety-five percent of the data in the smart factory is upstream, equipment, CNC machine tools, SMT production lines, all data is transmitted upstream for related analysis, and downstream data is mainly for sending control commands. Traditional 5G transmission has less uplink data and more downlink data, and the downlink peak rate is relatively high. Traditional public network equipment serves people and mainly uses downlink data to satisfy people who watch WeChat, videos, and cloud games. Foxconn's 5G small base station completely subverts the structure of the entire set of communication equipment, supporting 128 users in parallel, with an uplink and downlink rate of 1.6Gbps, and an end-to-end delay of 5ms.

????This 5G small base station has been set up and tried in the Longhua factory, and it will be open to customers to visit within 2 months. The 5G small base station will complete related debugging in January 2020. If it comes to 5G+ IoT applications, it includes large connections, high speed and low latency. 3GPP has already considered in 5G, the factory PLC is virtualized on the edge server, and the motion control means that the motor is upgraded to the 5G edge server. In the integrated control, low latency and high reliability are achieved.

The introduction of 5G into the factory still needs to solve two major problems

????Gree Electric is the first batch of 5G users. Under 4G network conditions, Gree has deployed smart cameras in every corner of the factory with built-in behavior recognition technology, that is, behavior analysis of employee actions through smart algorithms, and effectively records and monitors whether employees’ operations are performed. Compliance and prevention of production safety accidents.

????At the end of 2018, Gree took the initiative to seek information from operators whether 5G could solve the problem of camera freezes. After testing, it was found that compared with the original 4G and WIFI networks, the 5G network delay doubled, achieving the level of 30ms, and 5G The high rate can make the single-camera bit stream rate reach 4M. Gree installed 5G networks in two such factories.

????Two major problems also need to be solved urgently. Liu Hong, General Manager of Technology of GSMA Greater China, believes that at present, since most 5G networks are NSAs, 5G SA must be completed in order to give full play to the low latency and large connection characteristics of 5G networks, and have the ability to introduce network slicing and edge computing. A series of new technologies can open up space for applications in various vertical industries. There are also 5G network security issues. In order to improve efficiency when using 5G networks, if they encounter security issues, enterprises are also worried about adopting them.

????As a demonstration project of domestic 5G+ industrial Internet landing this year, on April 24, 2019, Zhejiang Mobile and Xinfengming Group signed a 5G smart factory strategic cooperation agreement, and the fate of China Mobile's 5G and Xinfengming began. Xinfengming, as the earliest "early adopter" of 5G industrial Internet applications in Jiaxing, has now achieved full coverage of 5G networks, and has implemented applications in multiple fields such as mobile office, video communications, and data collection.

????Intelligent robots have been applied in the Xinfengming workshop. Intelligent inspection robots are based on ZTE’s 5G network slicing and edge computing technology. In the deployment of this solution, the 5G SA network is applied to replace the traditional transmission network. The data is directly in the factory area. It is transmitted to the computer room of Xinfengming to ensure that the data does not leave the park, which effectively guarantees the security of enterprise data. At the same time, using the low-latency transmission capability of 5G, the front-end collection to the back-end data transmission can be completed in milliseconds, combined with the edge computing deployed to the park Technology, the process of data analysis and processing can be completed within 200m.