Nanotronics is an advanced machines and intelligence company that helps customers across the public, private, and nonprofit sectors solve for the unique inspection and process control challenges of precision manufacturing.

A leading developer of optical inspection tools for the semiconductor industry, Nanotronics uses hardware and software to provide industrial-scale, high-throughput, super imaging systems. Deployed across fifteen countries and industry agnostic, Nanotronics works with leading-edge companies, from aerospace, to electronics, to healthcare, to drive up yield, reduce footprint and waste, lower costs, and speed up design iteration, while eliminating laborious manual inspections. 

Today, high-tech companies are integrating Nanotronics’ advanced optical inspection systems into their precision manufacturing processes. The company’s flagship technology – nSpec – is the world’s first automated industrial microscope. Compact enough for deployment on the factory floor, with software configurable to client specifications, it combines advanced computer vision, machine learning, AI, optical microscopy and robotics to inspect the world’s most advanced technologies, including microchips, LEDs, nanotubes and more. nSpec can recognize, classify and measure nanoscopic flaws, allowing for real-time correction. 

Full Factory Solution
Nanotronics has developed Intelligent Factory Control (IFC), a full factory solution using AI to automate and steer production pipelines, enabling machines to autonomously correct for irregularities in the production process in real-time.

Its viability has been demonstrated with an additive manufacturing model using 3D printing, making truly intelligent self-inspecting, self-optimizing factories an achievable goal. Not only does the platform promise to improve yield but, at its best, will transform manufacturing by significantly reducing by-products, shortening supply chains, controlling costs and footprint, while fostering higher levels of creativity and innovation.  

Use Case
Solugen, an emerging specialty chemicals manufacturer, is incorporating IFC during their production process to address any risks associated with chemical contamination and prevent potential malicious activity. The collaboration aims to ensure clean water production and safety. 

How it works: Intelligent Factory Control uses Artificial Intelligence to continuously monitor the production of Solugen products and through reinforcement learning agents, is able to determine whether there are anomalies in the process that are too subtle for humans or traditional control systems to detect. It works inline and defects or anomalies are discovered as they happen, as opposed to further along in the production process. Invisible to the human eye, the process prevents expensive backtracking.

Who Could Benefit from IFC?
High-tech companies across multiple sectors should look to deploy Intelligent Factory Control (IFC) in the manufacturing of next-generation 3D chips, advanced fabrics and materials, quantum sensors and more, making these products – which are highly susceptible to small variations in production - scalable and viable at the industrial level. Flaws will be detected and corrected long before the costly assembly reaches the end of the production line, avoiding destructive testing processes while increasing yield, reducing waste and by-product, and enabling the upskilling of employees. 

Critically, the Intelligent Factory Control (IFC) platform supports accelerated innovation and fosters rapid and cost-effective scaling of products for demanding mass markets. Through its capacity to transform modern manufacturing, Nanotronics gives companies the ability to reduce their environmental impact, enhance the creativity and quality of the workplace and use their smaller footprint to locate factories within communities in desperate need of economic growth and opportunity – many of the same communities that formed the backbone of the last great era of factory manufacturing.