Smart Industry 1/2016

Setting Standards
for Smart Chips
■ Industrie 4.0
The German industry is getting serious
about “Industrie 4.0”, as the Industrial
Internet is called in that country. At
the recent Hanover Industrial Fair, a
group consisting of virtually all the
major industry associations involved
in manufacture and electronics got
together to found the “Standardization
Council Industrie 4.0” which will be
tasked with helping to create national
and international standards and reference
architectures for IoT applications.
Recognizing that Germany lags behind
others in IoT readiness, the Council will
seek to establish working groups with
associations in other European countries
to create a counterbalance to U.S. domination
in this fi eld. Members include the
Society of German Engineers (VDE), the
IT industry association Bitkom, as well as
the Electronics Industry Association ZVEI
and the standards body DIN.
Michael Scholles, who also works for
Fraunhofer’s IPMS. According to him,
the high cost of more powerful Smart
Sensors is still prohibitive in many
cases, but they are necessary for most
high-value projects in the realm of
IoT. “We need to see a substantial reduction
in sensors’ prices sometime
soon”, he believes. Since wafer space
in semiconductor manufacturing is
limited, the best way to make sensors
cheaper, he believes, is to reduce their
size so you can fit more them on each
substrate. Adding extra technology
to the silicon is not the best idea, he
thinks; a better way would be to try
and combine existing chips in order
to avoid the high costs of developing
new ones.
Dr. Gunther Kegel, the vice president
of the German Engineering Society
(VDE) and CEO of Peperl+Fuchs, an
SME specializing in factory automation
systems, agrees. “The large investment
necessary to create more highly
integrated chips is self-defeating”, he
believes. His solution is to “borrow”
existing technology from other fields.
“Sensors can be made universally
adaptable”, says KIT’s Prof. Beigl, “the
subsequent production steps can’t.”
In order to be integrated into complex
manufacturing processes, systems
need to be easily customized. And in
order to keep the number-crunching
costs as low as possible, reference
architectures and know-how transfer
will be necessary, he believes, if SMEs
are to be able to become the future
champions in a world of IoT. If not,
they will be priced out of the market.
Security is the other big issue companies
worry about when considering
whether to move to Smart Sensors.
This is especially true for smaller companies,
especially since most sensors
are manufactured in the Far East or in
America where data protection and
privacy rules are perceived as less
strict than in Europe. They fear that
the quality of their products could sink
and they themselves be swamped by
legal suits brought against them by
irate customers.
“IoT must be fully protected against
shoddy sensors and manipulated
data”, says Oliver Winzenried, CEO of
Wibu Systems, a cybersecurity company.
Sensors should be able to au-
In order to be
integrated into
complex manufacturing
processes,
smart
sensors need
to be easily
customized.
Prof. Michael Beigl
Karlsruhe Institute of
Technology (KIT)
Keeping in touch
Smart Sensors with
wireless capability use a
wide range of communications
standards
communicate with other
applications via the Cloud.
thenticate themselves, he believes,
automatically providing proof of their
origin and the integrity of their data
transmission systems. Appropriate
symmetrical and asymmetrical encryption
solutions are available today,
he maintains, but sensor manufacturers
often fail to use them due to cost
concerns. The best way to go about,
Winzenried feels, is to move the authentication
and security functions
to a separate chip, which shouldn’t
cost more than 10 Cents or so. Even
cheaper are pure software solutions,
for which Wibu charges a flat 0.5 percent
of the total price of the systems
they sell. “A sensor that costs 2 Euros
needn’t cost more than one cent extra,”
he says. And software offers the
best possible way of securing a “naked”
sensor, be it ever so smart.
BLE-Link
APP
Sensors
Cloud
Server
APP, IT
application
TCP/IP-Link
SRWN-Link
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