In the 21st century, the industry entered its fourth revolution: Industry 4.0. While this is an incredible improvement over previous industrial revolutions, it’s still inefficient and fragile. For example, nearly half of global waste is caused by manufacturing inefficiencies. Factory downtime and inefficiencies create additional costs for the manufacturing industry. 

The above challenges are driving the need for more intelligence at the factory. Flexible and smart factories are the path to resiliency and efficiency. While flexibility and configurability are achievable at the higher levels of the smart factory hierarchy, it’s much more complicated when going to the physical resources layer. There, the factory equipment needs to interface with the sensors that collect the real-world physical quantities. Those sensors are associated with analog front ends (AFEs) that convert the physical quantities to the digital world. Each AFE is optimized to its sensor and could be measuring electrical variables such as voltage, current, or resistance.

When some of the sensors need to be replaced, say, due to reconfiguring the factory floor, the measurement unit that includes the AFE will also need to be replaced. This means halting the production process while the factory floor is being reconfigured.
The obvious solution is to have software-configurable universal AFEs. 

The NXP NAFE family has been designed to satisfy the requirements of the Smart Factories. In this webinar we will show how the NAFE features allow factory software configurability at the physical layer.