If you'd like to use any of these stories, please contact us for images, more information, etc. Thank you.

Media Contact:
Advantech Corporation, Industrial Automation Group
Chuck Harrell
Phone: (513) 742-8895 x333 Fax: (513) 742-0554
Email: chuck.harrell@Advantech.com

CONNECTING AND CONTROLLING THE FOOD AND BEVERAGE INDUSTRIES
SUMMARY: The food and beverage industries have a history of manual operations, from one end of the plant to the other, including lab and quality operations. In order to improve productivity and quality control, many food and beverage operations have begun integrating these operations and making them conform to automation standards.

DRIVING THE NETWORKED INDUSTRIAL PLANT - POWER OVER ETHERNET
SUMMARY: In the 1990s, industrial plants began to integrate and merge their “islands of automation” by networking devices to programmable controllers and controllers to control systems and HMIs (human machine interfaces). As the number of intelligent devices increased, the demand to supply power to these devices also increased.

SWITCH WITH CONFIDENCE: AVOIDING THE PITFALLS WITH INDUSTRIAL MANAGED SWITCHES
SUMMARY: The office isn’t a factory but its networking standard, Ethernet, can be successfully applied in a plant – if the proper steps, and some care, are taken. Done right, the benefits include an inexpensive communication and control network with a low total cost of ownership and virtually 100 percent uptime. Done wrong, the results could be unexpected downtime, a loss of product, and the kind of events that make the news.

INFORMATION ON SCREEN: VIDEO SURVEILLANCE IN INDUSTRIAL AUTOMATION
SUMMARY: Seeing is believing, according to the old saying. That explains some of the advantages video surveillance has to offer for industrial automation. With cameras and the right technology, operators and engineers can survey a scene in a remote or dangerous area safely. Also, they can be in many places at once, seeing with their own eyes what is happening without risking those eyes – or other body parts.

USING HMI'S TO LOWER YOUR COST OF OWNERSHIP
SUMMARY: Thirty years ago, operator stations consisted of indicators, push-buttons, possibly a recorder, all mounted in the door of a large enclosure or on the face of a pedestal enclosure. Inside the box was the PLC, and each of the components of the operator station had to be hard-wired together by hand. Each of the terminations and each of the components was a single point of failure just waiting to happen and the cost of producing each operator station was very high. Jump ahead to today?

MAKING THE SMART GRID WORK
SUMMARY: In order to bring down the cost of supplying power and reduce the carbon footprint of the power industry worldwide, many governments and industries have been moving the transmission and distribution of electricity to a new "smart grid" model. This model is expected to produce a real-time responsive electric system from power generation to end consumers.

DIVIDE AND CONQUER: MULTI-CORE PROCESSORS AND AUTOMATION APPLICATIONS
SUMMARY: In this white paper, we will look at why multi-core processors were developed, explore the characteristics of an industrial automation computer and then examine what features a multi-core system should have. The paper will then detail the advantages a multi-core system offers for automation applications and describe a real-world example. It will conclude by looking at what the future holds.

POWER OVER ETHERNET: MYTHS, MYSTERY, AND THE FACTS
SUMMARY: When Ethernet and TCP/IP becase the de-facto standard for all networks, weather on the plant floor, in the control room, the plant office, or the entire enterprise connectivity level, the concept of Power over Ethernet (PoE) was born. This white paper goes into great detail on this topic.

NEXT GENERATION OF EMBEDDED COMPUTING PLATFORMS
SUMMARY: It all started with Moore's Law, of course. In the April 1965 issue of Electronics Magazine, Intel co-founder Gordon E. Moore described the doubling of electronic capabilities. "The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year ..." he wrote. "Certainly over the short term this rate can be expected to continue, if not to increase."

HIGH AVAILABILITY ARCHITECTURES FOR ETHERNET IN MANUFACTURING
SUMMARY: Outside of craft manufacture, like blacksmithing, or custom jewelry making, it is no longer possible to manufacture anything in any quantity without automation. In some cases, such as semiconductor manufacture, it is not possible to manufacture without automation at all.

THE RISE OF THE PROGRAMMABLE AUTOTMATION CONTROLLER
SUMMARY: It was only thirty years ago that most industrial processes were controlled either by hardwired relay logic or analog loop controllers. It was only thirty years ago that the Space Shuttle's three computer systems had less than 100 kilobytes of RAM and ran their entire complex programs in that space. It was only thirty years ago that there was no such thing as a PC.

BENEFITING FROM INDUSTRIAL ETHERNET AT THE DEVICE LEVEL WITH SMART REMOTE I/O AND PEER-TO-PEER TECHNOLOGY
SUMMARY: Industrial enterprises can grow to big for efficient automation control using traditional technology. However, advances in Industrial Ethernet can provide a solution.

BEST PRACTICES FOR NETWORKING AUTOMATION COMPUTERS
SUMMARY: Automation computers can be anywhere, and do very many things. Modern automation computers are connected to networks that may be connected to other networks throughout the plant, and via TCP/IP to the entire world.

ETHERNET ENABLING SERIAL DEVICES IN HIGH AVAILABILITY MANUFACTURING?
SUMMARY: Today, manufacturing organizations world wide are working on reducing complexity in the manufacturing process and increasing the transparency of processes throughout the enterprise. The ability to communicate data from any part of the enterprise to any other part of the enterprise is core to making modern manufacturing work.

WHAT DOES AN AUTOMATION COMPUTER LOOK LIKE?
SUMMARY: Every day, without thinking about it, we use hundreds of computers in every facet of our lives. Nearly every device with a display or a control in our homes, in our offices, and in our factories, has a computer in it. In our factories this is especially true.

THE ADVANTAGES OF SMALL FORM FACTOR HMI
SUMMARY: As embedded computers have become ubiquitous, so too the need for human machine interfaces has grown. Once found in only complex control systems, like distributed control systems in refineries and other process plants, HMI systems are now found in many guises and many locations, from games to industrial machines and tooling systems, with many stops in between

CHASING MOORE'S LAW - THE TRUTH BEHIND THE OS AND CPU UPGRADES FOR INDUSTRIAL PC USERS
SUMMARY: The COTS effect has been almost as big a revolution as that signaled by the phrase uttered by Alexander Graham Bell, "What hath God wrought?" COTS is a three letter acronym that stands for "Commercial, Off The Shelf," and the COTS revolution has changed commercial computing, created personal computing, impacted telecommunications, and made huge changes in the industrial environment. Most of these changes have been incredibly beneficial. Some have made technologies practical and affordable for applications that were unthinkable thirty years ago. Some have been problematic and some have caused significant FUD. (FUD is another three letter acronym, standing for Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt.)

CARRYING SERIAL DEVICES INTO THE FUTURE
SUMMARY: First in the laboratory, and then on the plant floor, serial digital communication was the earliest means of data transmission from device to device. What's the future?

EMBEDDED HARDWARE AND OS TECHNOLOGY EMPOWER PC-BASED PLATFORMS
SUMMARY: Everywhere we look we find computers. Many of them don't look like traditional desktops, or laptops. In industrial infrastructure, we find them in displays, in networking appliances, in machine controllers, in HMIs and in industrial controllers and PACs (programmable automation controllers). We find them in low power, portable devices, and even in field transmitters

GIGABIT ETHERNET: MEETING THE FUTURE WITH INCREASED BANDWIDTH
SUMMARY: Much has been written about the use of Ethernet in manufacturing. Ethernet has been around a long time. For computers and networking, it has been around practically forever. One of the great benefits of this fact is the time-tested and de-bugged nature of the Ethernet protocol for networking. Since the mid-1990s, Ethernet networks have become ubiquitous. They are used in offices, in homes, in workplaces, in building automation, and with increasing dominance, not just frequency, on the factory floor.

GET ON THE BUS: USB IN INDUSTRIAL APPLICATIONS
SUMMARY: For industrial automation users, technology giveth and taketh away. On one hand advances in semiconductors and software result in smarter and more capable computer and machines, making the job of automating a process easier and more robust. On the other hand, those same advances spell trouble. The answer to this question maybe the USB.

PROGRAMMABLE AUTOMATION CONTROLLERS FIND THEIR NICHE...EVERYWHERE!
SUMMARY: In the beginning there was the relay and the timer. And in the process industries, there was the hardwired controller. Then, there was the Programmable Logic Controller (PAC). Today, it's the Programmable Automation Controller (PAC).

HIGH BRIGHT DISPLAYS...GET THE PICTURE!
SUMMARY: In the old adage, seeing is believing. In today’s modern industrial applications, seeing is more than that. It’s the essence of control, since the human machine interface (HMI) involves the presentation of visual information. That’s why there’s such a demand for high bright displays in highly customized industrial computers and in stand alone industrial monitors.

PRODUCTION MONITORING AND DATA MINING - NO STRIP MINING ALLOWED!
SUMMARY: Any manufacturing or process plant has many sources of production data, and that data, if kept, very soon becomes voluminous.

THANKS FOR THE MEMORIES - STORAGE MEDIA IN INDUSTRIAL APPLICATIONS
SUMMARY: When it comes to data storage for industrial applications, users no longer have to go around in circles. They now have a choice between rotating magnetic media – hard disk drives with spinning platters – and flash memory

EVOLUTION OF PC BUS TECHNOLOGY
SUMMARY: Over the last decade, there's been an increasing trend toward the use of PC-based automation solutions. In the early 1990's, large automakers and other manufacturers began using standard PCs for machine control.

WINDOWS XP FOR EMBEDDED APPLICATIONS
SUMMARY: The embedded version of Windows XP is a componentized version of the well-known Windows XP Professional operating system. Instead of everything being wrapped tightly into a single package, XP Embedded breaks the OS down into more than 10,000 individual components, allowing developers to create systems that have the functionality and familiar features of XP.

Elements of Robust PC-Based Control
SUMMARY: The combination of declining PC prices and increased robustness of operating systems and softlogic control applications have resulted in enormous growth in PC-based control since the mid-1990s. But while the basic PC is standardized, not all PCs are equal – particularly when it comes to operating reliably in industrial environments...