New industrial Fieldbus capabilities have been added by Xmos to the company’s xCORE family of multicore microcontrollers. These solutions are focused towards time-sensitive applications such as industrial communications or robotics.
The company is initially introducing its Fieldbus xSOFTip soft peripherals and an industrial serial bus (IS-BUS) I/O card (sliceCARD) for its modular sliceKIT development system, enabling communication via RS485, CAN and LIN. Further industrial products will follow throughout 2013.
“For timing-critical electromechanical applications, particularly those in which robotic components interact with other real-world elements using sensors, you need a truly real-time solution,” observed Nikolai Ensslen of Synapticon.
“Xmos technology provides incredibly low-latency, allowing us to implement multi-axis, multi-node robotic systems, combining control and inter-node communications functions within the device. “
These processors are ideally suited for use in industrial applications because they combine flexible and time-sensitive communications capabilities with the ability to implement latency-critical control functions.
These demanding applications need to close multiple asynchronous control loops in real time, and often require distributed intelligence and communication over real-time networks. These MCUs are described as delivering real-time control and communications in a single, deterministic, multicore architecture supported by an easy-to-use software design flow.
Industrial protocol bridging provides a good example of some of the challenges faced by producers of industrial systems. Current solutions are said to be not ‘real-time’; they are expensive and inefficient; and separate devices are needed to support the different protocol tasks.
In these applications the company can replace multiple devices with a single multicore microcontroller. Cores such as these can make the development task simpler and the system can be developed, debugged and tested using an easy-to-use software-based design flow that is familiar to any programmer.
Xmos
