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27/04/2009
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Industrial networking is a fragmented market and a growing number of industrial communications standards means fpgas to the rescue.
Industrial networking is a fragmented market in terms of technology. Before the introduction of Ethernet, standards were implemented by a small group of industry leaders. However, according to Stefano Zammattio, senior product marketing engineer with Altera, there is still a distinct lack of unity. "Although the market is growing," he observed, "we have several leading vendors, each with varying Ethernet standards."
With microprocessors and dsps steadily decreasing in price, motion control system manufacturers are creating drives that are effective and reasonably priced. Zammattio noted: "For most manufacturers, the trend has been to arm the drive with more local processing power and flexibility – leveraging the increasing amount of processing power available per dollar." However, he conceded, the industrial market is changing and making faster, more intelligent, drives is not enough to satisfy the demands of industrial customers.
"Today," he said, "every market is under pressure to reduce costs. In the industrial sector, cost reduction means creating more efficient factories, rather than faster or more intelligent drive systems. This means factory wide information systems, low cost control networks and manufacturing systems that can be reconfigured quickly and cheaply to allow manufacture of a different product. These cost reducing measures can be enabled by the use of industrial Ethernet (IE) on the factory floor and equipment that can be modified easily for new applications or systems."
There are more than 20 IE standards, each providing slightly different solutions to industrial networking challenges. Although setting up new systems using IE is quick, drive manufacturers can be left with the problem of which protocol to support. Customers will demand an option that best fits their application and budget, but manufacturers are still faced with the problem of supporting multiple IE standards cost effectively.
Zammattio continued: "An obvious solution is to develop custom daughter cards (one per IE standard) or to integrate a multi standard asic into the controller. But, because there are so many standards and because asic devices quickly become obsolete, you would need to support a new product development for each change and each new protocol to be supported. This is an expensive solution, especially when calculated over the long term of industrial equipment lifetimes."
A board that carries a low cost fpga and Ethernet PHY transceivers can – with appropriate hardware and software IP – support any IE standard. And the fpga can be reconfigured to support new protocols at any time – even if the device is in a machine already on the factory floor. "This allows system developers to program in new IE protocols, or updated versions of the current protocol," continued Zammattio. "It also enables them to reuse the same equipment in any part of the factory. Legacy support is easy: simply install the appropriate fpga configuration that supports the version of the IE protocol used in the rest of the equipment and your device is ready to connect to the system. A low cost fpga based implementation of an IE protocol can be cheaper and consume less power than one based on a multi standard asic and certainly is much more future proof."
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Author
Chris Shaw
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