How collaborative manufacturing facilities are impacting industry’s future

Manufacturing keeps evolving—and the facilities that house manufacturing in the U.S. are also changing and innovating. Given that 54% of domestic R&D occurred in manufacturing in 2021, according to the National Science Foundation, it makes sense for industrial facilities to be the places that enable experimentation and encourage product development.

There also are collaborative efforts underway to remove barriers and create ecosystems to build stronger supply chains and provide an entry for the commercialization of emerging technologies at next-generation manufacturing facilities.

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Collaborative facilities devoted to innovation have been working on initiatives that include:

Utilization of advanced fiber technology to make programmable backpacks that use no wires or batteries, but they still connect to the digital world.
Using light instead of electronics to power cloud-based data centers, drastically increasing the speed of transfer tenfold, while reducing cost and energy consumption.
Extending the range of electric vehicles by reducing weight and mitigating energy loss during transfers.

Here is a snapshot of some of the next-generation manufacturing facilities within the Manufacturing USA network that are shaping the future of U.S. advanced manufacturing:

A silicon carbide foundry

Located in Lubbock, Texas, is the world’s first open silicon carbide foundry. The facility was a former Texas Instruments facility that made traditional silicon wafers. The goal of the facility is to remove barriers of entry and help commercialize wide bandgap (WBG) power electronics technologies, which increase the energy efficiency and reliability of power electronics.

Wide bandgap technologies, including both silicon-carbide and gallium-nitride power semiconductors, have implications for legacy power electronics applications such as industrial motor systems, consumer electronics, and data systems. These technologies meet the needs of next-generation high-voltage applications such as grid modernization, manufacturing plant power systems, offshore wind, and multi-megawatt motor drives.

This foundry employs a collaborative model, which provides companies that lack their own silicon carbide fabrication capabilities with access to a shared production and R&D facility. Up to 20 American companies of all sizes can use the production equipment at various times.

A test, assembly and packaging facility

This collaboration between the American Institute for Manufacturing Integrated Photonics and the Defense Department is situated in Rochester, N.Y. Integrated photonics involve using light for applications traditionally addressed through electronics. It’s also used in communications as well as laser-based radar and sensing because it provides improved performance and reliability of electronic integrated circuits while significantly reducing size, weight, and energy consumption.

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This facility is a key component as it provides a connection point within the photonics supply chain. It is the world’s first open-access Photonic Integrated (PIC) Test, Assembly and Packaging Facility and provides development and production process capabilities that enable small and medium-sized businesses to bring integrated photonic chip technologies through the product development cycle—something they otherwise might not be able to afford.

The facility has advanced photonic sensors using light as radar (LIDAR). These tiny LIDAR sensors provide real-time 3D mapping for driverless cars, manage database systems for cloud computing, detect sarin gases in national security environments, and enhance medical imaging as well as rate food safety by measuring the interactivity of chemicals. This will make a huge difference in increasing data output while dramatically reducing energy consumption.

LIFT’s High Bay facility

Located in Detroit, this facility serves as the headquarters of LIFT, the national advanced materials manufacturing innovation institute and public-private partnership between industry, academia, and government.

The High Bay facility opened in 2017 and serves as a technology accelerator and pilot facility, which serves as a showcase, highlighting the “art of the possible” and future of advanced manufacturing, and a sandbox, in which the institute’s ecosystem can design, test and prototype new materials, manufacturing processes, systems.

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There is a need for novel, advanced materials in the aerospace, automotive and defense industries enabling components to be made which are fit for purpose and most importantly, keep our warfighters safe.

With over $55 million in leading edge advanced manufacturing equipment, combined with the institute’s virtual modeling and simulation expertise, the LIFT High Bay facility is the epicenter of accelerating the development and adoption of advanced materials and manufacturing processes for the U.S. industrial base.

The facility also features the LIFT Learning Lab, perched above the High Bay, which gives students a bird-eye view of what the advanced manufacturing world looks like today.

The Learning Lab is an immersive space featuring seven unique labs to both providing hand-on experiential learning opportunities for middle and high school students to certification courses preparing adult learners for careers in advanced manufacturing which are available today.

A fabric discovery center

Located in Cambridge, Mass., is a center is leading the transformation of traditional fibers, yarns and textiles into highly sophisticated integrated and networked systems.

This facility is a collaboration between Advanced Functional Fabrics of America and the Department of Defense, developing innovations such as an advanced fabric-based hat that receives data from overhead light sources for long distance, directional and high-bandwidth communications and electrophoretic color change, which allows military camouflage to change with locations and environments.

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This facility is the world’s first to feature end-to-end prototyping capability, from CAD design to machine tooling to pre-form fabrication and systems integration.

It houses a one-stop shop for fiber technology—knitting and weaving machines are close to draw towers and engineers are close by working on semiconductor device fibers.

The facility provides the perfect venue for ideation, development of product concepts, experimentation with processes and consultation with experts and research.

BioFabUSA’s Tissue Foundry

This facility was established by the Advanced Regenerative Manufacturing Institute in collaboration with the Department of Defense in Manchester, N.H. The goal was to develop an ecosystem for large-scale manufacturing in Tissue-Engineering and Regenerative Medicine, offering potential opportunities for life-changing medical treatments. This is the first demonstration of scalable, modular, automated and close manufacturing for a tissue-engineered product.

The tissue foundry is composed of a series of manufacturing modules, or subsystems, that begin with the culture of cells and extend to the packaging of a final product. The facility integrates innovative cell and tissue cultures with advances in biofabrication, automation, robotics, and analytical technologies to create disruptive research and development tools and FDA-compliant volume manufacturing processes.

The foundry aims to produce an automated closed system that is sealed off from the environment, unlike traditional manufacturing. Such a system would not be reliant on costly capital investments in clean room facilities and improve the possibilities of cost-effective operations at scale. Advances in TEMP manufacturing processes will be used to fabricate 3D implants, scaffolds, and tissue constructs.

The future is now

These innovative advanced manufacturing facilities are just a few exciting examples of the large-scale support for manufacturing innovation. The facilities not only bring expertise from all over the industry together to create even more revolutionized technology, but they also attract new manufacturing workers to the industry.

These facilities attract federal funds as well as private investments to continue this revolutionary work. They also allow educational organizations, private sector business and government entities to work together to advance manufacturing technologies.

Because of the major role that advanced manufacturing plays in the U.S. innovation ecosystem, it makes perfect sense for partners to collaborate to increase technological competitiveness and driving product and process improvements that will have a positive effect on the U.S economy.