A brief guide to Pharma 4.0 adoption

View of a production line at the Reig Jofre company’s headquarters. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Pharma 4.0 projects may have gotten off to a slow start, but they have ramped up recently.

And many of such projects to date have been in the Big Pharma space, according to the CRB’s 2021 Life Sciences Horizons report. “It makes sense because a lot of these digital technologies have a big dollar sign with them and Big Pharma tends to have the funds for that,” said Yvonne Duckworth, senior automation engineer at CRB.

As adoption matures, more startups will likely embrace Pharma 4.0 technologies, Duckworth said. Even cash-strapped startups building new facilities could lay the groundwork for smart factory upgrades in the future. “It’s about being forward-thinking in designing new facilities,” Duckworth said.

[Related: Pharma 4.0: Industry 4.0 Applied t…

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  • March 24, 2022
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Exploring pharma applications of Xilinx’s adaptive system-on-modules

Image courtesy of Xilinx

Earlier this year, Xilinx (San Jose, Calif.) launched its Kria line of adaptive system-on-modules (SOMs) for a host of AI applications, including in factory and healthcare environments. In terms of the former, the SOMs target digital twin, predictive maintenance and defect detection applications.

SOMs, which are small embedded boards about the size of a credit card, enable the abstraction of hardware functionality. As a result, developers can design at the board level rather than the chip level. For hardware designers, SOMs promise to avoid rudimentary design work. SOMs also enable software developers to begin work in parallel with a hardware team.

Smart factory applications related to vision AI are a core focus area for the first product in the Xilinx SOM portfolio, the Kria K26 SOM.

As a result, factory owners deploying SOMs can get smart factory projects up and runni…

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  • July 27, 2021
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