 Welcome to the ST stand here at Electronica 2016, where Gerard Cronin here is going to talk me through this smart industry demo. What is in effect the factory of the future? Hi Chris, yes. So smart industry for ST is about factories and workplaces that are more efficient, more flexible and therefore more productive. It's about also about making them more environmentally friendly and making them safer for the people that work there. Our factory starts already outside the factory with semiconductor technology enabling people who arrive to charge their cars for example using these smart chargers. Here where the battery is full, the charger sends a message to the owner of the car or the smartphone. We also have the benefit of smart lighting. These lights detect the level of ambient light, they detect the presence of human beings and then they adapt the lighting according to that. So they can maximise the energy saving then and also maximise the lighting for the individual users. Or then move inside the factory, people go through the door by using an NFC badge to come into the lobby of the factory. Have you got something up your sleeve though because there's nothing new about that technology there? No, indeed. So when they come into the lobby they then can enter the smart office area. But to get into the smart office area they need to go up to a facial recognition platform. This facial recognition is powered by a microcontroller which runs very efficient algorithms. This solution with a microcontroller is much more cost effective and less complex than what was used in the past. When the person has been recognised they can move into the smart office area. In the smart office area they get information such as if they've been assigned a desk for the day, if they have a meeting room and they get information to guide them over there. So this smart office is also where we receive the manufacturing orders. These come in and are automatically transferred to the factory. Our factory takes the baseline product and customises it according to the needs of the user. These baseline products actually contain an NFC dynamic tag. And this tag at the beginning of the manufacturing process gets all the information about how to customise the product and where it's going to be delivered to. So your technology not only tells the factory what to make but then where to send it? Exactly. So once it's been programmed it goes to the manufacturing process. It's processed according to what is inside the tag. The information is read out. Also the information of how it's been processed is put back inside the tag. This enables you to have the lifetime history of the product even though it's not. If we look a little bit at the robots here, these robots are powered by highly efficient drive electronics. They have embedded intelligence. They have configurable electronics inside. But the important thing is that these are actually embedded in the robots themselves and not in a separate cabinet. This is not the case in most factories today. This leads to significant savings in space, in wiring and in a fit cost efficiency. What about safety which is, you know, non-negotiable in factories today and let alone the future? Exactly. These machines also contain a number of technologies that make them safer. For example, integrated galvanic isolation makes them safer and makes smaller and more compact electronics. They also have functional feature that is built in. These features basically ensure that the machine fails in a way that is not dangerous for users. They also have things like proximity sensing. For example, we have over here, we simulate a person approaching the machine. The proximity sensor detects the person and the machine stops. These machines also have microcontrollers and sensors which measure the critical parameters in the factory, such as vibration, temperature, flow, etc. All this information is then sent to a central control where it is processed and the relevant information is uploaded to the cloud. This allows, for example, the machine manufacturers to give optimal advice on maintenance and machines thanks to big data analysis over their whole pool of customers. What about data safety, though? Because if this is in the cloud, you make yourself a target for hackers. Exactly, exactly. So this is a really important point. All of the machines here need to have their data secured and all of the communications need to be protected. So each of these machines will contain the secure microcontroller that protects the data and secures all the communications, whether those communications are inside the factory between machines or whether they're going outside up to the cloud. Finally, what about power management? Power management is one of the core fundamentals, of course, of the factory. And here, thanks to the latest generations of power semiconductor technologies, we achieve reactive, configurable, real-time power management. For example, microcontrollers enable you to get millisecond level changes of power curves and optimize your factory for that. And then the same technologies that we've been seeing here can, of course, be used in the warehouse. They can be used for smart lighting, they can be used for environmental control, they can be used for real-time tracking, optimized shipping and so on. So the entire manufacturing process, from arriving at work to products being shipped, you're there supporting companies all the way? Exactly. Whatever the need is, we have a solution. Gerard, thanks for your time. Thank you, Chris.