Europe and Germany are currently taking a lead role in industries such as automotive, energy, safety and industrial electronics. The work of Productive 4.0 should help companies position themselves for a future of broad digitalization. To remain internationally competitive over the long term, the partners wish to develop a user platform that guarantees greater efficiency, quality and flexibility throughout the entire production and delivery chain.

The platform should make it possible for companies to collaborate with business partners across Europe with real-time digital networking to optimize shared processes. The participating project partners are researching methods, concepts and technologies for service-oriented architecture as well as for components and infrastructure of the internet of things. Productive 4.0 will furnish companies with fundamental tools decisive for the digital transformation of production processes. Additional aspects of the work include standardization as well as simulation of manufacturing processes for optimization of real task sequences.

Fraunhofer IIS/EAS will work within the project to research new system architectures and circuit concepts for drastically reducing the energy consumption in hardware components. For this purpose, the division’s generator-based design approach for analog circuits (intelligent IP) will be expanded down to the system level and innovative IP will be developed for sub-30 nm technologies. The development work is focused on ultra-low-power sensor nodes and networks.