Big Data streamlines fabs

Big Data streamlines fabs

PORTLAND, Ore.—Unless you've been living off the grid, you already know that the world is drowning in a tsunami of Big Data, especially in manufacturing settings where realtime analytics can pinpoint semiconductor fabrication errors and processing inefficiencies that could spell the difference between success and failure.

However, by integrating sophisticated analytics into Microsoft's structured query language (SQL), Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD) and Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. report a 90 percent reduction in data warehousing support efforts and a 10-fold boost in the speed of energy-efficiency analytics, respectively.

"Microsoft is leveraging its business intelligence (BI) expertise to offer Big Data solutions for manufacturing, including the automotive and electronics industries," said Sanjay Ravi, worldwide managing director for discrete manufacturing at Microsoft. "We believe that the confluence of ubiquitous sensors, connectivity, on-demand cloud processing and realtime analytics uniquely positions Microsoft for a new era of instant actionable BI."

One of Microsoft's biggest design wins so far is in the automotive industry, where it convinced Ford to adopt its Windows Embedded Automotive solution for Ford's Sync platform. Sensor data from the automobile itself, along with infotainment- and user-generated queries, are integrated by SQL both in-vehicle and using Microsoft's cloud computing environment, Azure, to provide seamless automotive analytics and realtime intelligence for everything from malfunctions to voice recognition.


Microsoft's Windows Azure cloud computing platform and its SQL Server with StreamInsight aim to streamline manufacturing analytics.

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