Micron Technology : Behold the Magic of Adapdix!

Behold the Magic of Adapdix!

I'm reading a biography on Houdini. His first major success came in Europe, where his ability to escape from handcuffs provided at random by audience members - 'challenger' cuffs - drove the Old World into a tizzy.

Something similar is happening with Adapdix, Micron Ventures' newest investment from the AI Fund. This startup demonstrates how innovation in machine-machine communication drives Industry 4.0.

Startups are figuring out how to 'get in there'

Micron, where I work, owns factories that are among the most heavily automated facilities in the world. Industrial automation exists - it's alive and growing.

Automation itself isn't the big challenge for Industry 4.0. As I found a few years back when I was exploring artificial intelligence (AI) for manufacturers in China, the hard things are integration and flexibility.

Here's what I mean. The following schema is massively oversimplified but essentially right:

Solid blue lines are information flow - data, commands, time stamps, handshakes and other info.

The dashed red line is a probe. It's the one physical link - an actual thing - between one part of this factory information system and the others.

To be a fully autonomous industrial system that continuously monitors itself and reacts/self-corrects based on the data it monitors, the system must operate seamlessly and fast. There's a universe of startups interjecting themselves at different places - between edge servers and the cloud, becoming the sensors and digitizing legacy machine fleets - and enabling industrial analytics in multiple ways. Some startups are growing. Some are not.

But here's the catch: How do you get your data work as close as possible to the tool sensor and controller (to minimize latency) while ensuring that this new invasive step - data processing and autonomous recommendation - does not compromise or threaten operation of the tool itself?

Put another way, if I have a highly automated deep UV lithography tool that costs me $50 million, the last thing I'm going to do is let some wacko startup risk downtime on my factory in a quest for some learned optimization or another.

This is the problem Adapdix has solved, bringing the data work closer to the tool sensor and controller and reducing latency. The company's solution offers that much-needed integration and flexibility.

Adapdix - you've got to see it to believe it

To learn more about how the company does it, check out the Adapdix website. Its EdgeOps technology strategy is a key ingredient for integration and deeper automation in critical, high-precision manufacturing processes.

This is where Adapdix does it:

We, like some of Adapdix's early customers, were skeptical. In a competitive space like Industry 4.0, Adapdix, waiting on the precipice for its big breakout, had its share of detractors. But as always, we listened, learned and saw Adapdix beat one challenger after the other, winning customers and proving the skeptics wrong. Not because of false claims or tricks, but because it works and delights industrial customers in ways we didn't think possible.

Like magic.

Andrew Byrnes

Andy is with Micron's AI fund investing in some of the world's top startups. He's a recovering startup founder, writer, and solar/battery materials geek, and when he's not thinking about technology innovation and startups, he's probably running or doing something weird with his young'uns. And he's big on words like 'young'uns.'