Industrial automation solutions to help accelerate Industry 4.0

Brendan O’Dowd, General Manager, Analog Devices’ Industrial Automation Business Unit, stated: “Our customers want to move fast toward Industry 4.0 but also need to ensure their investments are part of a viable, long-term plan. This can be extremely difficult to navigate given the current pace of innovation.

“We’re focused on a set of solution areas that represent immediate opportunity for our customers to put existing brownfield infrastructure on a path to Industry 4.0. Each of the solutions we’re announcing today are critical building blocks in these strategies, which include Deterministic Ethernet, security, and condition-based monitoring.”

Analog Devices’ Industry 4.0 solutions:

Device-level security and time sensitive networking (TSN) switching capabilities
ADI is now providing new hardware-based identity solutions that enable security at the edge of the network within a factory control loop, and improve a field device’s security posture to meet security standards and requirements. These new capabilities are integrated with a real-time Ethernet multi-protocol switch with TSN features, including time synchronisation (802.1AS) pre-emption (802.1Qbu/br), to control industrial applications via OPC-UA.

By combining security capabilities with TSN features, ADI is enabling state-of-the-art field device communication solutions at the edge of industrial networks, in an easy-to-use model that accelerates customers’ time to market and adoption of Industry 4.0.

ADcmXL3021 module for condition-based monitoring (CbM)
The ADcmXL3021 module is a complete sensing system based on ADI’s award-winning micromechanical (MEMs) sensor technology, which increases productivity and reduces equipment repair by monitoring early indicators of machine fatigue and failure across industrial equipment and transport vehicles. This triaxial vibration sensing module combines the MEMs sensor with several signal processing functions within a compact form factor to simplify development and provide significant bill of materials savings of smart sensor nodes in CbM systems.

High-precision RADAR sensors for industrial applications
Symeo, now part of Analog Devices, recently introduced the 60GHz Industrial RADAR Sensor Family LPR-1DHP-200. These next-generation positioning systems feature highly precise, robust 1D distance measurements with an accuracy in the millimetre range for advanced automation, transport, and production processes.