About DatumProof
DatumProof designs automation equipment, and builds the equipment design platform it designs on. This page covers why this problem, what principles we work by, and what we do not do.
The starting question
If the physical system being controlled is not that complex, why does the control software become so hard to understand, so hard to change, and so hard to verify?
The answer is not that the machine is complex. It is that requirements, system behaviour, abnormal handling, verification conditions and past design decisions are not expressed in any explicit, executable form. What is not expressed cannot be checked. What cannot be checked is not known until the machine runs — which is why verification of equipment software is deferred to the very end.
Our article on why equipment software cannot execute the right half of the V-model covers this structure in detail.
Principles
The reference for equipment software is the design. Yet that design usually lives in natural language and in the heads of senior engineers — in a form where the question "is this right?" cannot even be posed. That is where we start.
"The tool says so" does not carry on a factory floor. Findings come back as event sequences you can walk through in a design review. If a person cannot read it and judge it, we do not consider it a finished deliverable.
Checking a design is not a universal answer. It covers the design, not the assembled machine. Models are abstractions, and choosing an abstraction has real limits. We explain what our product cannot do before what it can.
What we do not do
The first worry about any new tool is: does this mean changing everything we already do? The answer is no.
We do not take over how your PLC programs or control software are written. The platform produces the tables and procedures your control design works from, alongside the development you already have.
Wiring, assembly, the actual response of a motor — everything that only the real machine can settle stays testing’s job. Verification and testing answer different questions.
The platform does not draw wiring diagrams. It hands electrical CAD the lists it imports, and stays ahead of it rather than in its place.
Where we sit
Most of the attention in physical AI goes to machines that already exist — how a robot or a piece of equipment perceives, decides and acts.
Before any of that, someone has to build the machine: decide its parts, its states, its sequences, its interlocks, and what must never happen. That is the side DatumProof works on — designing equipment, and building the platform that makes its design something that can be checked.
Principle
A machine should be designed from one explicit model — the one its drawings, its tables and its procedures all come from.
Founder
Hyungjin Kim has written equipment control software across aerospace, display and semiconductor — in all three, on the side that builds the machine rather than the side that runs it.
And all three times the wall stood in the same place —— the design was never left in a form you could ask whether it was correct. DatumProof exists to fill that gap.
Career
2010–2026
Aircraft design, and the development of advanced precision equipment for display and semiconductor manufacturing.
Company information
Registered in Japan as a kabushiki kaisha; the office address in Japanese is 神奈川県横浜市中区桜木町1丁目101番地1 クロスゲート7階. Enquiries reach us most reliably through the form or by email.
Which machine, and what is the most painful part right now.