In a factory on the Carolinas’ border, Stanley Black & Decker is assembling cordless electric drills. As part-finished drills travel in boxes along a conveyor belt, a robotic arm photographs and scans them for defects. Another robot nestles electric motors into the drills’ casings. A third one places and tightens screws. A single piece of software oversees the entire production line, which is capable of pumping out 130 cordless power tools every hour under the supervision of just seven humans. The assembly line it replaced in China needed up to 40 workers and rarely produced more than 100 an hour.

在卡罗莱纳州边境的一家工厂里，史丹利百得公司正在组装无线电钻。装在箱子里的半成品电钻沿着传送带运输，一只机械手臂拍摄和扫描它们的瑕疵，另一只机械手臂将电动机安装在电钻的外壳中，第三只机械手臂放置和拧紧螺丝。整个生产线由一个软件监控，仅在 7 名工人的监督下，每小时生产 130 件无线电动工具。它取代的中国生产线需要多达40 名工人，每小时的产量很少超过 100 件。

“Thirty years from now we will laugh at our generation of humans, putting products together by hand,” predicts Lior Susan, the boss of Bright Machines, a San Francisco-based company that installed the plant’s software. It is not that the design of the electric drills or the various steps involved in making them have changed. Rather, it is the way the automated machines doing the work are being driven by instructions that have been encoded into software having been in effect copied from the brains of Chinese factory workers, who mostly did the job manually.

“三十年后，我们将会嘲笑自己这一代人手工组装产品”，Bright Machines公司的总裁预测道，这家总部位于旧金山的公司为该工厂安装了软件。并不是电钻的设计和制造步骤发生了变化，而是自动化设备的作业方式由编写到软件中的指令来驱动，这些指令其实在效仿中国工人的大脑，他们通常手工组装产品。

Making things this way resembles a model used by the semiconductor industry, where chips are designed using software that directly lixs to the automated hardware which fabricates them. For the Fort Mill plant, and other firms starting to employ such software-defined manufacturing systems, it promises to transform the factory of the future by allowing more-sophisticated products to be designed and put into production more quickly. All of which promises big cost savings.

这种制造方式类似于半导体行业的模式，即芯片由软件来设计，软件与制造芯片的自动化设备直接相连。对于米尔堡工厂及其他企业来说，采用软件定义的生产系统有望改造未来的工厂，它可以设计更复杂的产品，加快投入生产的速度。这一切都有望节约大量成本。

Make this please

请制造这种产品

To understand why, consider a simplified version of how a new power tool is made. A team of designers come up with a fresh feature, say a longer-lasting battery. They map out every element of the new product, from the battery compartment to the circuitry, that needs to be changed as a result. It is complex work, not least because a small change to one component can have a big impact on another, and so on.

要想明白原因，想一想新式电动工具的简单生产流程。设计团队提出一种新的产品特性，比如更持久耐用的电池。他们设计出新产品的每一个元素，从电池舱到电路，结果都需要改进。这是一项复杂的任务，尤其是因为其中一个部件的细微变化可能会对另一个部件产生重大影响等等。

The design is then “thrown over the wall” to the people responsible for making it. Sometimes that is a third-party factory, often in China. Engineers, designers and production staff exchange information and meet up, constantly tweaking the design in response to the various successes or failures involved in making a series of prototypes. Little things, such as a screw that cannot be tightened correctly because it is hard to reach with an electric screwdriver, might result in a return to the drawing board—which nowadays is mostly a computer-aided-design (cad) program.

然后，设计方案会被“抛过墙去”交给制造人员。有时交给第三方工厂，通常是中国工厂。工程师、设计师、生产人员交换信息并会面，不断地调整设计方案，以应对制造一系列原型产品所遇到的各种成功或失败。小问题可能导致产品重返制图板，例如：由于电动螺丝刀难以够到而无法拧紧螺钉。如今的制图板通常是计算机辅助设计程序。

Eventually, all the kinks are ironed out (hopefully) and the new product is ready for production. The finer details of how all this was achieved, however, are likely to remain locked up in the minds of the workers assembling the prototypes. Humans are, after all, incredibly flexible and often come up with workarounds.

最终，所有的问题都得到了解决（但愿如此），新产品准备投入生产。但是至于如何实现这一切的细节，恐怕还是组装原型机的工人才清楚。毕竟人类非常灵活，往往能想出变通的办法。

This process has been employed for decades, yet is inherently uncertain and messy. Designers cannot predict with any confidence what things the factory can or cannot easily accommodate. As a consequence, the design team may purposely leave some features a bit vague, and be put off innovative ideas for fear of being told it cannot be made or is impossibly costly.

这一流程已被沿用了几十年，但本质上存在不确定性和混乱。设计师无法自信地预测哪些是工厂能够轻松应对的，而哪些则不能。因此设计团队可能故意把某些特性设计得有些模糊，并搁置他们的创意，因为担心工厂说做不出来或成本过高。

When the hardware is controlled by software, rather than by humans, all this changes. Designers can dream up new products with a far greater certainty that they are manufacturable. This is because the constraints of the production line—even fiddly details like the positioning of screws—are encoded in their cad programs. Those programs, in turn, are directly connected to the software which controls the machines in the factory. So, if a design works in a digital simulation, there is a good chance it will also “run” on the production line.

如果硬件由软件而不是人类控制，这一切都会有所改观。设计师可以构思新产品，更加确信其可制造性。这是因为生产线存在的限制——甚至是螺丝定位这种繁琐的细节——都被编写进生产线的CAD程序中，这些程序又与控制生产设备的软件直接相连。因此如果设计方案在数字模拟中可行，那么很可能在生产线上也会“运行”。

This tight integration of manufacturing hardware and cad software has been a boon in semiconductor manufacturing, where vast machines etch circuits into silicon just a few nanometres (billionths of a metre) wide. Chip designers with firms such as Apple, Nvidia or Qualcomm use specialised programs, largely produced by two companies, Cadence and Synopsys, to sketch out circuits. The design files are then sent directly to silicon foundries, such as tsmc, in Taiwan, for production.

制造设备与CAD软件的紧密结合为半导体制造带来了福音，大型设备将电路刻蚀到线宽只有几纳米（十亿分之一米）的硅片上。苹果、英伟达、高通等芯片设计公司使用专业程序来设计电路，这些程序主要由“楷登电子”和“新思科技”两家公司制作。然后，他们将设计文件直接发送给台积电等晶圆代工厂进行生产。

“Until the advent of those tools, people were laying out integrated circuits by hand,” says Willy Shih of Harvard Business School. Mr Shih imagines the impossibility of attempting to do that today with, for instance, Apple’s m1 chip, which contains 114bn transistors. Producing such complexity is only possible in a system where software allows humans to ignore the detail and focus on function.

哈佛商学院的史兆威表示：“在这些工具问世之前，人们一直在手工设计集成电路。” 史先生认为如今这样做是办不到的，例如苹果公司的M 1 芯片包含 1140 亿个晶体管。只有在软件允许人类忽略细节和专注于功能的系统中，才有可能设计出这么复杂的产品。

Stanley Black & Decker has not yet turned its cad tools loose on Bright Machines’ system to design new products. But the idea is that they soon will. “What Cadence and Synopsys did to semiconductors is what we will do to product design,” says Bright Machines’ Mr Susan.

史丹利百得公司尚未在 Bright Machines 系统中使用CAD工具来设计新产品。但他们打算很快也要这么做。我们将采取“楷登电子”和“新思科技”在半导体领域的做法，Bright Machines公司的苏珊先生说道。

Layer by layer

逐层打印

Some companies have already started designing products this way. VulcanForms is a foundry, but one that makes metal components rather than chips. It operates out of a former aircraft hangar in northern Massachusetts, where its vast computer-controlled machines focus 100,000 watts of invisible laser light onto a bed of powdered metal. The powder melts and fuses into intricate patterns, layer by layer, until a component with dimensions specified to within a hundredth of a centimetre emerges. It could be part of the engine in a military drone, or a perfectly formed hip-replacement joint. This is a type of additive manufacturing, more popularly known as 3d-printing. VulcanForms’ machines are driven by cad software and can produce any metal component with a diameter up to about half a metre.

有些公司已经开始以这种方式设计产品。VulcanForms 是一家代工厂，但它生产金属部件而不是芯片。该公司的前身是马萨诸塞州北部的一座飞机库，由计算机控制的大型设备将10万瓦的不可见激光照射在金属粉末床上。金属粉末逐层熔化并融合成复杂的图案，直到尺寸限定在百分之一厘米以内的部件出现。它可能是军用无人机发动机的一部分，也可能是完美成型的髋关节置换关节。这是一种增材制造方式，更通俗地称为3D打印。vulcanforms公司的设备由CAD软件来驱动，可以生产直径不超过半米的任何金属部件。

“When I became familiar with what VulcanForms was doing, I could see predictable patterns that mirrored some of the learning with semiconductors,” says Ray Stata, the founder of Analog Devices, an American chipmaker, and a member of the foundry’s board. In chipmaking, he says, the software lixing designer and manufacturer has produced huge gains in efficiency and economies of scale.

“当我熟悉了 VulcanForms公司的做法时，我看到了可预测的模式，这些模式反映了半导体领域的一些学习成果，”美国芯片制造商“亚德诺”的创始人兼代工厂董事会成员雷.斯塔塔说道。他说在芯片制造领域，软件将设计公司和制造商联合起来，在效率和规模经济方面产生了巨大的收益。

VulcanForms uses software made by nTopology. This lets people without the skills required to operate lasers, to design obxts for production by the foundry. It can result in components with previously unmatched levels of performance, because they can be produced as complex geometric structures which are impossible to manufacture any other way, says John Hart, chief technology officer of VulcanForms. obxts can be created at high volumes, such as forging 1,000 spinal implants from a single powder bed. With additive manufacturing, products can also be produced in one go, as single components, rather than being assembled from individual parts. This reduces the amount of material required as the parts tend to be lighter. It also cuts down on assembly costs.

VulcanForms公司采用nTopology制作的软件。这使得不具备相关技能的人也能操纵激光器，设计出由代工厂生产的物品。VulcanForms公司的技术总监约翰·哈特表示，其生产出的部件可具有以前无与伦比的性能，因为它们可以被制造成复杂的几何结构，这是其他制造方式做不到的。它可以大批量地制造物品，例如仅用一台粉末床就能锻造出1000个脊柱植入物。增材制造还可以将产品作为单个部件一次性生产出来，而不是由单个部件组装而成。由于部件往往变得更轻了，所以减少了耗材，还能降低装配成本。

Software-defined manufacturing has an impact on some of the big trade and political challenges faced by companies. For firms that are increasingly uncomfortable with relying on Chinese manufacturers, it can make reshoring production a more viable option. Mr Susan puts it in martial terms: “Manufacturing is a weapon. When we give design files to China, we give the source code of that weapon to our enemy.”

软件定义制造对企业在贸易和政治上面临的重大挑战产生了影响。对于越来越不愿意依赖中国制造商的企业来说，这可以使生产回流成为更可行的选择。苏珊先生用军事术语说道：“制造业是一种武器，当我们向中国提供设计文件时，等于把武器的源代码交到敌人手里”。

There will be implications for manufacturing jobs. Although automation usually means a reduction in the number of people assembling things on the shop floor, it also creates some jobs. Technicians are required to program and maintain production systems, and in offices successful companies are likely to boost the numbers working in design, marketing and sales. These jobs, though, require different skills so retraining will be necessary.

制造业的就业将受到影响。尽管自动化通常意味着车间组装工人的减少，但它也创造了一些就业机会。技术人员需要对生产系统进行编程和维护，而在办公室里，成功的企业可能会增加设计师和营销人员的数量，这些工作需要不同的技能，所以有必要对他们进行再培训。

Mr Shih also notes that factories themselves, not just the machine tools and processes within them, are coming under the thrall of software. He cites Tecnomatix, a subsidiary of Siemens, a German industrial giant, whose software lets designers lay out an entire factory so that the making of new products can be simulated in a virtual environment, known as a digital twin, before manufacture begins in its physical counterpart.

史先生还指出，不仅机床和制造流程，就连工厂本身也受到软件的控制。他引用了德国工业巨头西门子的子公司 Tecnomatix的例子，他们的软件可以让设计师设计出整座工厂，以便先在虚拟环境中模拟新产品的制造（称为数字孪生），然后在现实环境中开始制造。

If the future of manufacturing is following semiconductors, then there is still some way to go. Producing mechanical obxts is not the same as etching elaborate circuits that have no moving parts. For a start, things are far less standardised, with components having all sorts of end uses. “We’re just at the beginning with mechanical structures,” says Mr Stata. “The whole process of putting materials together in an additive method is in its very early stages. The flexibility and possibility that opens up is mind-boggling.”

如果未来的制造业正在追随半导体的脚步，那么还有很长的路要走。制造机械物品不同于刻蚀复杂电路，后者没有移动部件。首先，标准化程度低得多，零部件的最终用途各不相同。“我们在机械结构方面才刚刚起步”，斯塔塔先生说道。“通过增材方法将材料结合在一起，整个工艺还处于非常早期的阶段，由此带来的灵活性和可能性令人难以置信”。

Yet some of the implications are becoming apparent. Products could reach a level of performance and precision which is simply unachievable when their production is limited by human hands. Laying out a factory floor in two dimensions to accommodate human workers will become a thing of the past. Factories designed by software will be denser, much more complex three-dimensional places, full of clusters of highly productive, highly automated machinery.

然而，一些影响正变得越来越明显。产品可以达到的性能和精度水平是人工作业根本达不到的。为容纳工人而设计的二维车间将成为过去式。由软件设计的工厂将是密度更大、更复杂的三维场所，摆满了生产力高、自动化程度高的机器设备。

These factories of the future may be almost deserted places, attended to by a handful of technicians. But with software also taking care of the intricacies of production, they will be easier to use by people developing and designing new products. That should free their imaginations to soar to new levels.

未来的工厂可能几乎空无一人，只有少数技术人员负责管理。但由于软件也能处理复杂的生产过程，所以人们使用这些工厂来开发和设计新产品将变得更容易。这应该能释放他们的想象力，使其达到新的高度。