And they’ve put your digital twin in a box.
Every city looks good at night. Even Detroit. The city from which almost everyone with money seems to have fled, according to one former resident, still offers a breathtaking view from the 72nd floor of the Renaissance Center, once GM’s headquarters and now a Marriott. We’re here to attend Siemens annual Media and Consultant (MAC22) event. Finally. It had been delayed twice, thanks to COVID.
Detroit reminds us all of America’s glory and its place at the pinnacle of manufacturing. It makes sense for an international design, engineering and manufacturing software company (Siemens) to locate its annual event there. Plus, the company’s CEO, Tony Hemmelgarn, lives nearby. So does Brenda Discher, who after a career at Autodesk, has invigorated Siemens with the Xcelerator brand.
Onstage, Discher seemed delighted to have a live audience. Her personality simply cannot be contained in a Zoom meeting.
“I’m an extrovert,” she said. “I know. Hard to believe.”
The war in Ukraine, taking the world’s attention away from the pandemic, was acknowledged. Siemens, like many multinationals, must have Russian and Ukrainian developers and customers. Cedric Neike, who Discher referred to as one of her two bosses (with Hemmelgarn being the other), laid it out: “55 percent of all gas in Germany is from Russia. It’s 100 percent in Austria. We need to get away from it. We’re working with the U.S. to build LNG [liquefied natural gas] terminals.”
Cedric Neike referred to Siemens as “the good Doppelganger company” called Siemens’ xDT, or Executable Digital Twin, a digital twin on an edge device (more on that later).
An automotive theme is practically a requirement for any event in the Motor City venue, and MAC22 is no exception. Siemens is an OEM to every automotive company, though many cannot be named. To America’s auto companies, Siemens brings factory automation. An industry expert who attended the event credited Siemens with coining Industry 4.0, aka the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
“An average Industry 4.0 factory, if it’s really connected, produces 2200 terabytes of data a month. What does that mean?” asked Neike. “That’s a half million Netflix movies.”
While America’s glorious past was dutifully acknowledged and Henry Ford respectfully referenced, we were pointed to a future with cars powered by electricity, not fossil fuels, of assembly lines staffed by robots, not workers. We’re here to help, says Siemens. Our applications will help you design and build better batteries for EVs, our software will simulate driving your AVs. Our digital twins will come in handy for both.
“In Europe, Asia and in the U.S., hundreds of billions of dollars will go into manufacturing factories and in the next three years they will be building batteries with a fairly inefficient process,” said Neike. We can use digital twin technology there. With our software, we can build batteries with better heat dissipation. We can take all the elements to build a digital twin and dream up the battery which is more efficient. We can take data and use it for an efficient production. Battery manufacturing is water intensive. 40 percent of the energy used in battery manufacturing goes to dry it up. Let us simulate this. We can get the information to the next design, so the manufacturing process is better so you don’t have to recall hundreds, thousands, millions of cars because there’s a bad battery cell.”
Enter Tony Hemmelgarn
German engineering/manufacturing superiority or not, it helps to have an American deliver the message to Americans. Here is Tony Hemmelgarn, CEO of Siemens Digital Industries. Hemmelgarn, a Michigan native, finds a way to make Siemens palatable to an American clientele.
“We’re #1 in automotive,” said Hemmelgarn. He recounted deals that have knocked rival software vendors off their perch at the big automobile companies.
Big auto accounts are the battlegrounds for the Big Four CAD software vendors (Autodesk, Dassault Systèmes, PTC, and Siemens). The manufacturing industry as a whole—while second to construction in terms of expenditure—still commands outsized mindshare for the public at large and the automotive industry retains its glamor.
Siemens Digital Industries Software, a division of Siemens GmbH, is currently in 2nd place in the Big Four CAD vendors with annual revenue of €4.3 billion.
Siemens GmbH gives its software division a considerable advantage over other engineering software companies in that the manufacturing firm consumes what it produces. Siemens’ manufacturing operations are encouraged to use Siemens software products, or “drink their own champagne,” as Tosh Tambe, VP of Business Transformation and SaaS Strategy, puts it. One might have thought that Siemens’s software division could make a living by selling to its parent company, but that portion is likely a small fraction of the software division’s revenue.
Instead of a software division that grows fat and content from a captive audience, it is the captive audience that is calling the shots. The software division must produce or enhance applications as needed by the manufacturing, according to Tambe.
This arrangement provides a valuable test bed for Siemens software, which must get the product right for family members before peddling it to the rest of the world. This may create a predicament for customers who are also competitors, but Siemens must be used to trying to explain this. It has licensed its Parasolid geometry kernel to its chief competitor (Dassault Systèmes SOLIDWORKS) for more than 25 years.
Software for All
“What is a car except a computer on wheels?” asked Neike.
The car company that cannot be named in Detroit (Tesla) is software driven. Tesla is loath to allow its name to be used to endorse products.
“We’re in every automotive company in one way or another,” noted one Siemens person in a private conversation.
Hemmelgarn is happy with “flipping” Hyundai at MAC22. “We flipped Chrysler years ago. We’ve taken a lot of business away from our competitor in the space,” he said in an interview.
On Edge
Perhaps the biggest takeaway from MAC22 was Siemens Executable Digital Twin, or xDT. For the first time, the vague concept of a digital twin in the cloud is replaced with a digital twin in a tangible, physical location—a box you can hold in your hand. Siemens brought the box, an IPC (industrial personal computer), to the show.
“In here is your digital twin,” said Ian McGann, director of Innovations Office of Siemens, pointing to a little aluminum device, covered with I/O ports and heat dissipating fins. It is a major league version of a Raspberry Pi, we hear. Siemens makes these ruggedized, no-nonsense computers for use in the control of factory and production equipment and as onboard computers for vehicles.
“We take a digital twin model that is created with a few prototypes and we leverage that throughout the entire lifecycle,” said McGann. “The simulation model that is created in the design of a few prototypes or a few products can be used for thousands of products. How do we unlock the power of a digital twin model across the entire lifecycle? This is what we’ve been working on with multiple customers over the last few years. We have come up with the Siemens Executable Digital Twin, or xDT. It is a self-contained executable digital behavior of an asset that can be leveraged by anyone at any point in the lifecycle. It is developed and realized by experts at the design stage and then can be real-time enabled. It’s self-adaptive, or self-calibrating. There are no additional solvers required. When you create an Executable Digital Twin, you package it up with all the solver technology, and that can be used throughout the entire lifecycle. You can use it on edge devices, like the Simatic IPC (pictured).”
An edge computer is a computer nearby but connected to the cloud. Its purpose is to do as much computing as possible and doing the rest with cloud power. An edge computer could be mounted under the hood of a car or near an industrial robot. With a local connection to its machine, it can make quick decisions; for example, it can react immediately to an impending crash and slam on the brakes. The latency inherent could literally kill you. An edge computer allows quick data processing and real-time decision-making.
Chip Design
It must be fun for an industrial colossus, as Siemens is, to have a software division at its beck and call. Should the path to ever-increasing microprocessor power be blocked, such as predicted by the death of Moore’s Law, Siemens can simply blast through it, changing the way microprocessors are designed.
“We can beat Moore’s Law,” said Hemmelgarn. “We can go 3D.”
With the distances between transistors on an integrated circuit reaching their theoretical limit, why not stack the planes, creating shorter paths along the Z dimension?
In Siemens’ case, this is not just wishful thinking. Siemens acquired Mentor Graphics, the leading semiconductor design software. If Mentor can’t make ICs with stacked layers, nobody can.
Semiconductor design used to be the exclusive realm of giants, such as Intel, Nvidia, AMD and Samsung. The giant semiconductor companies would make a microprocessor for all, and it would be up to the manufacturers to adapt their products to it. But lately, more manufacturers are calling the shots and, in some cases, taking matters into their own hands. Apple designed its own M1 chip, which powers its MacBook line, instead of relying on Intel as it had for 14 years.
Software Development Low Code
The Siemens software division covers all three bases of modern product design: mechanical design with NX, electrical design with Mentor and software design with Mendix.
Software has changed our world. Every smart product has a software component. A product simply cannot connect or be at all smart without software. But software creation had over the years become confined to specialists. Computer scientists, software engineers as well as self-trained coders have sprung up to create programs in languages of their own making—FORTRAN, COBOL, C++ and Python, to name just a few.
But low code, a recent and burgeoning category of software development, like Mendix, is nothing like the aforementioned “high-level” languages.
Low code applications allow the product engineer to create code by dragging and dropping boxes on the screen. Under the hood, the low code application creates the high-level code that the machine needs.
With Mendix, Siemens has democratized development—and covered all the bases of modern, smart product design.
