Potentials - July/August 2016 - 8

smart manufacturing and examine
the production and the manufacture
of products, in this issue we take the
liberty to explore manufacturing advancement at both the product level
as well as at the technology level that
would enable some of these products.
The articles in this issue cover
approaches extending from nanoscale fabrication to megascale
production. We hope you gain valuable insight into the manufacturing
and fabrication challenges existing
at both scales, as essentially some
of the nanoscale devices would be
turned into products sold at the
megascale.
"Smart Assembly for Soft Bioelectronics" by Chee Hwan Lee focuses
on the smart assembly of soft bioelectronics. These and related approaches to assemble bioelectronic
devices may prove critical to the
production and adoption of biocompatible structures in medical
devices of the future.
Many of us played with LEGO
blocks when we were kids. Following
this lead, "LEGO-Like Microassembly Using Reversible Dry Adhesion"
by Seok Kim presents the concept
of LEGO-like microassembly to discuss advances in micromanufacturing. This has enabled him to produce
teapots and motor-like three-dimensional (3-D) microstructures on silicon. The method can be extended
to research and develop different
kinds of structures at the micro- or
the nanoscale, which could be used
in different devices (for instance, the
accelerometer in your smartphone
uses a similar microsensor).
Three-dimensional printing is a
fascinating topic, and different kinds
of 3-D printers for home use are be-

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J u l y / A u gust 2016

ing developed and promoted on different platforms, including crowdfunding sites such as Kickstarter.
In "An Overview of 3-D Printing in
the Manufacturing, Aerospace, and
Automotive Industries," Choon Wee

and extends to the sensor-enabled
and cloud-based data analytics
necessary for making manufacturing smart. At the same time, this
is discussed with a perspective on
the role of smart manufacturing in

We hope you gain valuable insight into the
manufacturing and fabrication challenges existing
at both scales, as essentially some of the
nanoscale devices would be turned into products
sold at the megascale.
Joel Lim et al. present a discussion of
how 3-D printing is going to play an
important role in manufacturing
components in the aerospace and
the automotive industries.
Siwei Jiang et al. discuss modeling, simulation, and optimization
methods for manufacturing operations and supply chain networks.
Their article, "Complex and Intelligent Systems in Manufacturing
Operations and Supply Chain Networks," includes various ideas related to memetic computation and computational intelligence that could be
used to understand and improve the
many different complex processes
involved in large-scale manufacturing-from supply chain management
to factory assembly line.
In "SMART Foundry 2020," B.
Ravi focuses on a concept that presents an IT-oriented view of manufacturing being worked on by a
consortium of educational institutions and companies under the
sponsorship of state and national
governments in India. His article
covers the basics of manufacturing

IEEE PotEntIals

economics and job creation in countries like India.
The final article is dedicated to
semiconductor manufacturing technologies, a prime mover of consumer electronics market. In "Exposure
Optimization in Scanning Laser Lithography for Semiconductor Manufacturing," Andrew J. Fleming,
Adrian G. Wills, and Ben S. Routley
discuss the challenges in lithography
for integrated circuit design and associated optimization methods. The
decreasing feature size of transistors
(from the old 180 nm to the present
14 nm and beyond) has made lithography more challenging.
We hope that you will learn from
the breadth and the depth of these
smart manufacturing articles and
provide us with feedback so that
we may continue to bring you topics dedicated to subjects that most
interest you.

about the author
Sharad Sinha (sharad_sinha@ieee.
org) is a corresponding editor with
IEEE Potentials.

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Potentials - July/August 2016