The OPTIMAI project held its fifth plenary meeting on September 13th & 14th 2023. The event was hosted by project partner Carr Communications at their office in Dublin, Ireland.
At the meeting, we got the chance to catch up with Gregory Tinker. Gregory is a principal engineer at Microchip Technology. Microchip is a leading provider of smart, connected and secure embedded control solutions. Its easy-to-use development tools and comprehensive product portfolio enable customers to create optimal designs, which reduce risk while lowering total system cost and time to market. The company’s solutions serve approximately 125,000 customers across the industrial, automotive, consumer, aerospace and defence, communications and computing markets.
Read our exclusive interview with Gregory below!
- What role does Microchip play in the OPTIMAI Project?
Microchip is an end user within the OPTIMAI project working with the technical providers to understand and overcome some of the challenges we face producing complex and intricate electronics. At the start of the project, we were tasked with identifying problems in the process and express it in a form that enabled the technical providers to propose solutions. Subsequently, and as the project matures, we are now more involved with testing the solutions and evaluating them.
- Can you tell us about the status of the pilots?
The pilots are now in an advanced stage with hardware installed and datasets being provided to the technical partners to tune the solutions based on the requirements. Various items have also been provided in the form of silicon wafers, printed circuit boards, videos of the processes being carried out, along with a lot of photos. As the project has progressed it has been necessary to adapt and enhance some of the hardware to meet our aims and this has been successfully achieved.
- What impacts are you hoping the pilots will have, once complete?
As an end-user our main aim is to have a factory more efficient and productive than it was before we started. Another benefit is the increase in skills and knowledge of the new technologies brought together in projects such as OPTIMAI.
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