2013年9月17日 星期二

IT Technology for industrial applications


It is the author’s opinion that integration of the controls networking  and the IT network is inevitable. It became inevitable the moment the controls industry chose to use Ethernet as the medium with which to communicate data. The controls industry may choose to be dragged kicking and screaming into the modern automation  era, or it can gracefully embrace the change. Embracing means the controls industry would be able to leverage the myriad rich, existing technologies that have been proven foolproof in the IT world. To be dragged kicking and screaming into the modern communications era would do a terrible injustice to those who have worked diligently to bring it about. This could quite possibly add an entirely new facet to the fieldbus wars, which I hope have not been forgotten.
With that said, the controls world is going to be moving with an industry that has a definite consumer bias, with product development and release cycles of six months or less. In an industry where the average life expectancy of an automotive production line is eight years, it is impossible to expect the networking in an industrial setting to keep up with modern IT standards. Therefore, we turn our attention to the technologies that have existed the longest, with the most open standards and the very best support. These are the protocols we wish to use and keep, and this article highlights and explains some of these technologies.

refer to:
http://www.automation.com/leveraging-it-technology-for-industrial-controls-applications

2013年9月10日 星期二

Memory protection is crucial for your embedded system


Memory protection to prevent applications from interfering with one another  solutions accelerators that ensure deterministic, low-latency responses for real-time guests.

The ability to assign I/O to guest OSs for unimpeded, high-performance access Several Alliance members provide RTOS and hypervisor products that support the 4th generation Intel Core processors. For example, fanless embedded systems TenAsys eVM for Windows is a real-time hypervisor that uses Intel VT to enable RTOSs and other guest OSs to run along with Microsoft Windows. TenAsys also offers the INtime RTOS family, which can run as a stand-alone RTOS or alongside Microsoft Windows as shown in Figure 3. Both products enable users to partition a multicore platform to run mixed fanless embedded systems, making better use of the processor’s advanced features to provide highly integrated  solutions. (Microsoft and TenAsys are both Associate members of the Alliance.)

refer to: