Factory Automation Overview

HAROLD JOSEPH: So today, we're here to talk about factory automation.

My name's Harold Joseph and this is Alex Tan.

ALEX TAN: Hello.

HAROLD JOSEPH: And we're going to cover the campaign we have rolling out now over the
summer that looks at very specific areas of factory automation

and the kind of products we have to address those.

So with that, let's get started into the presentation.

So the objectives of this presentation is to give you an understanding of our factory
automation campaign, what we're planning to do over the summer,

and also the kind of products that are used in factory automation, and also provide you
with a better understanding of the solution needs in factory automation and how we
address those needs.

So the market is over a $1 billion analog market, so it's just huge, and the 16 largest
suppliers address less than 50% of the segment sales.

So that means everything is spread out quite a bit and there's many different kinds of
applications and needs.

So one of our efforts has been to try to focus down on the ones that are meaningful for
us where we can bring the most value.

We see a number of key trends driving the market.

We see a real drive for more energy efficient systems.

The cost of energy is a major factor in factory floors and in process control
applications.

We also see a competitive situation that's driving the need for increased productivity,
quality and throughput, and that's on a worldwide basis.

So as things become more competitive worldwide, there's a real drive for better or
finer control.

ALEX TAN: And that, I think, Harold, that's a part that we're really focused on
especially for the control network sections and the machine vision sections I'll be
talking about later.

HAROLD JOSEPH: Okay, yes and some of the areas that I'm looking at as well, like in
some of the sensing and measurement products, we're seeing an increase in nodes and
requirements

for those areas as people want to do more monitoring and measuring.

We're also seeing an increase in diagnostics to reduce maintenance and downtime, and
I'm seeing that in products where people are making more measurements.

And I think on your side, on your PHY series, that's been a major function of the PHY
product line that we're...

ALEX TAN: That's right.

We've seen a lot of traction.

We've been improving not only the capabilities of the diagnostics, but the availability
of diagnostics.

HAROLD JOSEPH: And then we're also seeing an increased adoption in wireless for
non-critical applications.

And where that comes in is primarily in the factory automation area on safety areas
where they're adding in sensing and measurement and functions for safety needs.

We are seeing a growth, to some extent, in some of the more process control areas.

It has not picked up there as quickly as it has in some of the safety areas.

So we've also identified some key areas that we're looking at in terms of industries
and focuses.

So on the industry side, pharmaceutical manufacturing, consumable manufacturing like
food, soap, detergent, automotive manufacturing, robotic control that's big for both of
our areas.

Also material handling, semiconductor processing.

And then in the process area, traditional process locations like refinery, chemical
plants, some of the food and beverage and the pulp and paper as well.

ALEX TAN: So we have a play on all of those different manufacturing technologies,
right?

HAROLD JOSEPH: Yes, and on the right is a list of the areas where we are focused on in
terms of some of the equipment, so distributed control systems,

PLCs with I/O modules, an area we both work very closely in.

ALEX TAN: Right, absolutely.

HAROLD JOSEPH: CNC machines, embedded computer boards, sensors, motor motion control,
machine vision, any particular ones that you think are of high focus in those areas.

ALEX TAN: Oh, absolutely.

The motor control, motion control, machine vision and sensors, I think in those areas
we have some really valuable technologies that have seen a lot of traction.

HAROLD JOSEPH: Okay.

This will give you an idea of the webinars that we are going to be producing or have
produced to support factory automation.

So, the first webinar that was out was the sensing module.

That was on 06/25.

Then you did a control networks module on 07/09.

ALEX TAN: That's right.

HAROLD JOSEPH: I've got a module on motor control coming out shortly, followed by the
I/O module, and then finally machine vision.

Is that going to be yourself or, I guess one of the other folks --

ALEX TAN: Yes, another person, right.

That's right.

HAROLD JOSEPH: So, now Alex, your specific area of interest is the automation control
networks, is that correct?

So I will turn it over to you at this point.

ALEX TAN: Thanks Harold.

So, in the automation control network, what we're really talking about is the overall
network that's used to control the different stations inside of a factory floor

or all these different manufacturing environments like Harold mentioned earlier.

And in these environments, the real challenge is to produce more products at a faster
rate and with a higher quality.

And what that's done to the networks is that's pushed the trend to use Ethernet-based
control networks.

So with an Ethernet-based control, it would replace RS-45 or proprietary bus with
something that's both more robust, more, I suppose, more used overall, and really gives
higher data rates.

The challenge with using Ethernet is that it wasn't really designed for a factory
setting or an industrial network where synchronization and latency and control are very
important.

It's not really a control network technology.

So, the next step is synchronization.

And by synchronizing the factory floor, you get the ability to have high speed for,
say, sort and diverters.

Or you could look at more accurate motion position and velocity control for coordinated
drives and robotics.

And in the next slide, I'm going to talk a little bit about one specific application.

HAROLD JOSEPH: Yes, but just so that I understand, so you're saying that .issue about
synchronization, that ability to provide better timing control is what really has made
a difference

in control on the factory floor, and that's what you bring in this product family.

ALEX TAN: That's right, yes.

So here's an example of a factory floor system.

In this case, this factory floor system is a pick and place machine, and the square or
the rectangular section in the middle is a conveyor belt that has product

that's moving along it, and there's a number of different interfaces that connect to
it.

So on the upper left, you have the human machine interface that is used to control the
system.

Also, you've got a GPS timing source that provides the time synchronization master for
the system.

Inside of the conveyor, or inside of the system, you have a bunch of different
components that actually have a lot of National parts beyond, say, just the control
network,

and that includes the drive controller, right?

And you've got distributed I/O, you have a motion controller, and these are all driving
different various components in that conveyor belt system.

In this system, also there is a industrial camera, a machine vision camera that's
looking at the parts as they go through, and determining if they meet the quality
standards.

And then there's a robotic arm that's then taking those parts, and in this case, either
putting it into the garbage or moving it on to the next stage for a good product.

And really, the key takeaway here is that, by synchronizing all of these components,
you end up with a system that's both faster and higher quality.

So let me talk a little bit about the Ethernet family of industrial PHYTERs that we
have that are designed for the industrial control network environment.

So these are single and dual port 10/100 Ethernet PHYs.

The first family is the single port family, and that's the DP83848 family of parts, and
that supports 10 and 100 megabits per second in MII and RMII, and we support
commercial,

industrial and extreme, and extreme is something that's unique to National.

And this doesn't have IEEE 1588s support built into it, but it does have low latency
JTAG support, Auto-MDIX.

These are all key features that are needed on the industrial floor.

HAROLD JOSEPH: So is extreme an issue of temperature or is it an issue of performance
and connectivity?

ALEX TAN: So, the extreme is driven by temperature.

So it's for an extreme range of temperature.

But it also is for our most robust solution for very difficult or challenging
environments for the parts.

HAROLD JOSEPH: Yes.

ALEX TAN: The dual port has two 10/100 ports on each device.

These come in both commercial and industrial temperature.

They also offer something that we call flexible port management.

The flexible port management allows you to configure data that's going through those
different ports in a variety of different paths depending on your application.

This could allow daisy chaining and other more advanced features in your network.

Additionally, with the dual port PHYs, we present our advanced cable health
diagnostics.

These are diagnostics that go beyond just the, at a failure PHY the default, but
actually monitor the system as it's running so that it could provide real time updates
on the quality of the link

that will allow industrial floor managers to schedule predictive maintenance on links
that are going bad instead of waiting to have to respond to a lines down situation.

That advanced diagnostics is carried into our new family of parts, the IEEE 1588 parts.

These parts are 10/100, starting with a single port PHY.

It's industrial temperature, but it has built in hardware support for the IEEE 1588 PTP
protocol.

And that is the protocol that's being used on the industrial floor to provide
synchronization between nodes.

And when the viewers go on to watch the other webinars, the webinar that I have on
control networks talks a great deal about it, both how the synchronization works,

and why people use it inside of these types of networks.

So I think the next section we have is the sensing solutions.

HAROLD JOSEPH: Oh, okay, thank you Alex.

So we've looked at sensing solutions a little bit differently.

We've gone ahead and looked at what are the most common sensors on the factory floor,
and we've looked at some of the trends there.

And what we're seeing with those sensors is that, first of all, we are seeing this
drive for better or finer control.

So we're seeing an increase in the types of sensing nodes and measurements nodes that
are being done on the factory floor in the process control industry.

So they're still looking at the same kinds of sensing, but we're seeing more of them.

We're seeing the move to smarter transducers where people are looking at taking a
sensing element, adding what they call "smarts" to it to do better calibration over,

say a wider temperature range, or a better response to signals.

They're also looking at putting in diagnostics in the devices to provide and get into
some of these maintenance issues.

We're seeing a rise in portable applications as well, and there's a big need there to
lower the overall energy of the systems, trying to make them work on,

say, smaller, lower voltage batteries, lower power batteries, and also to last longer.

And then we're seeing an increased need in system diagnostics, and I mentioned the
maintenance on the sensor, but we're seeing this over the whole factory floor.

So we're seeing that effort here.

You mentioned it on some of your industrial PHY products as well.

And we're seeing a real focus to, say, one of the most costly issues that we're finding
is this issue about the maintenance cost to go out and repair and take things

and to keep things up and running so they get better throughput.

ALEX TAN: And that's a situation that needs to be solved at every level of the network
all the way from your sensors, all the way through into the control network itself,
right?

HAROLD JOSEPH: Yes.

So when we look at sensors, one of the issues we find is that we will take and look at
a sensor, and sensor is you could take a typical device like a pressure sensor

which we're going to go through as an example today, and customers will look at a
variety of different pressure sensors, and they want a solution that addresses a very
wide range of applications.

So our product of op amps, or our family of op amps A/Ds really address a very wide
range of applications.

And in the case of pressure sensors, which we'll be talking about today, it addresses
virtually all of the pressure sensor applications that we see.

MEMS is a big area in this pressure sensor area.

So we've got some standard configurations that we've developed for this.

We also have developed pin and functional compatible families, so even if there is a
change in, say, a particular A/D because of a performance issue,

a customer can do a standard board layout and just put in the parts that they need.

I mentioned the issue in portable applications, so we're seeing a drive for lower power
op amps.

We've just released one of the lowest power op amp on the market.

Our ADCs all have power down features so they're very efficient.

So very low power devices, and our signal path solutions are among the lowest in the
industry, regardless and it involves a whole range of different products to address
those solutions.

ALEX TAN: It does include industrial portable.

HAROLD JOSEPH: Industrial portable, like a portable calibrator, for example or
something like this.

You know, you've got the same issues on battery power with those that we have with
iPods.

Maybe a little bit of bigger battery pack, but that same basic issue.

You don't want the battery that when --

ALEX TAN: The interface isn't quite as cool, but --

HAROLD JOSEPH: That's true yes.

ALEX TAN: Right.

HAROLD JOSEPH: Also, customer has limited design resources, so we've been working on
some of our tools and have recently released a Webench Sensor Designer

that starts with a customer's sensor, looks at the performance aspects in terms of how
the sensor talks about performance aspects, and then generates a solution compatible
with that.

So if you're talking about accuracy or linearity on a pressure sensor, we provide that
same information with a signal path, give somebody a solution guaranteed to work

with access to a board to check it out.

ALEX TAN: So that really simplifies and speeds up that design, right?

HAROLD JOSEPH: Yes, absolutely.

So, I'll quickly go through the areas we're going to be covering in the online
presentation that's available now.

We've looked at interface solutions for 4-20 milliamps, voltage output, A/D and
amplifier signal path solution with an SPI, I2C interface.

The key sensing areas we've looked at are pressure, temperature, optical, chemical and
pH.

These are the most common areas on the factory floor.

And as an example of our approach, I've put in a pressure sensor.

So you've got a block diagram on the right.

It shows an instrumentation amplifier configuration and an ADC with a bridge sensor.

And these bridges are typically driven either voltage or constant current, very common,
defined with pressure sensor, anywhere from a 3K to a 6K bridge.

You also have anywhere from 30 millivolts to 100 millivolt output.

So you've got a configuration that we can address with just a limited number of
products.

A good starting point for us is the 7715 to 16 with an ADC 121 S101 that will address
the majority of the signal path applications.

We would typically use something like an LMP 7702 for the constant current drive of the
device or a single amplifier for constant voltage.

And when we look at the applications, we look at A/Ds in terms of performance and op
amps in terms of areas like bandwidth, noise, offset and power.

And we will go through this kind of presentation for each of the sensors and then give
you a list of the products that we would recommend for those applications.

So we're trying to narrow down the list to say here's the discrete list of products
that we would look at to address those particular kinds of areas.

And typically, one set, like the 7715/16 with one of the A/Ds might address all of the
sensors made from one manufacturer.

Now is, next area's machine vision, and that's over to you, again.

ALEX TAN: That's right.

So machine vision is in the high speed data path group.

And really, National has been playing in the machine vision space for a long time.

We've got our Channel Link SerDes products that have been a de facto standard for the
machine vision products.

But going forward, what is the challenge?

The challenge in machine vision is to inspect products at higher speeds and with more
detail.

So the trend is to use this high resolution and fine resolution image systems to be
able to detect the details of a product as it's going past, and also to do it faster.

So that means that you have to support high bandwidth cameras, often using SerDes
devices, and that the resolutions that you use are not necessarily your standard video
resolutions.

You know, a video resolution might be a 780 x 400 or something like that, but in this
case, they would use these nonstandard resolutions like.

So the SerDes devices also provide support for the higher bandwidth without any
software.

So it's a very simple connection.

It basically acts like a data pump.

Also, a SerDes connection allows smaller cables that give you improved robustness and
allow your, say, your mechanical assembly to move faster or with lower power motors.

So you said it doesn't use any software, just pumps the data.

And that's always been, I understood, the limitation with a lot of these systems is the
software side.

Is that correct?

ALEX TAN: That's right, because if you have to have a software driver, you have to have
software support.

That means that you've been framing data inside of your, say, a PGA or a
micro-controller.

That adds a lot of burden to the system as opposed to just a camera directly to a
SerDes, then ship the data over to a frame grabber that'll do the analysis.

HAROLD JOSEPH: I see.

ALEX TAN: And also, the SerDes provide a small form factor to support nanohead camera
and other smaller devices.

Here's an example of a machine vision system.

In this case, the key requirements here are things like high resolution that would have
a multi-lane, so multiple video channels, and longer reach.

And you have a sensing unit that has a sensor.

In this case, we're talking about like a CCD sensor, a CMOS imager, and going through
an FPGA that's connected directly to the SerDes.

And then, like I said that's a data pump that goes right to the processing unit.

And from there, it'll go to a display or go to a control or go to storage, or
potentially all three but inside of a factory automation system.

HAROLD JOSEPH: And you're working pretty closely with the FPGA manufacturers, because I
understand that they're also trying to drive to get down to a lower cost systems right
now,

and you're working on developing solutions with them so you can put this all through
the factory floor.

ALEX TAN: That's right.

We're working very closely with the FPGA manufacturers.

Also, from the standpoint of the product families, the new product families, the first
one is the FPGA-Link product that goes from 1.25 gigabits per second to 3.125 gigabits
per second,

and can go a maximum reach of 40 meters on a CAT-6 at 1.25 gigabits per second.

If you run at a higher bandwidth, of course, it goes a shorter distance to 20 meters.

But these systems are redundant, they support daisy chaining, they're FPGA-friendly.

They have an LVDS and parallel interface.

And, so it provides a lower system BOM and quick design time.

The next family is the FPD-Link 2 family, and that's 120 to 2700 megabits per second,
and that's 4 meters to 8 meters of CAT-6 at that 2 gigabit per second speed.

And this provides a larger data bit interface from 10 bits all the way up to 32-bit
data, depending on the family, and it will lock to random data.

It has a low EMI and connects directly with the FPGA or ASIC as we were talking about
working very closely.

The older product family that is being used in a number of machine vision systems today
is the Channel Link family, and that is also called Camera Link.

For those systems, it's 500 to 5,000 megabits per second, and the distance you get for
those is from 4 meters to 8 meters, and that supports a bus from 21 bits to 48 bits.

And one important thing to see there is that these systems allow you to have
plug-and-go seamless video.

So on the bottom of your screen, you'll see the headers.

Using the SerDes, you can remove those headers and have all of your bandwidth going
towards data.

HAROLD JOSEPH: Now there was a demo that was done.

I think it's part of like a podcast or whatever, right?

And did it address one of these particular products?

ALEX TAN: That's right.

It was on the FPGA Link family of products.

HAROLD JOSEPH: Okay, and that was an actual demo and that's online too.

That was done as part of our newsletter I think.

ALEX TAN: Yes, absolutely.

HAROLD JOSEPH: Okay.

ALEX TAN: Okay, now I think it's back to you Harold with the motor control.

HAROLD JOSEPH: Okay, so this is a specific area on the factory floor where you see a
lot of different requirements,

particularly concerns about driving things like robotic arms and motion control, all
kinds of motors.

Motors are used throughout the factory floor.

The biggest issue we see with motors is an increasing need to conserve energy cost.

If you actually look at the lifetime cost of a motor, more than 99% of the lifetime
cost of that motor is the energy the motor consumes, not the actual hardware cost of
the motor itself.

And motors are one of the largest energy consumers on the factory floor.

ALEX TAN: That's pretty surprising actually.

You wouldn't expect that so much would go to the motors.

HAROLD JOSEPH: Yes, there's even, in some regions, they're even charging factories who
consume a lot of energy, they're looking at, say,

having a tiered sort of cost structure where if they can bring down their cost, they
can pay it less per kilowatt hour or something for the energy that they burn.

And one of the issues you have with motors is that if you instrument a motor and you
can control the motor torque, you can run it efficiently.

If you don't have instrumentation on the motor to control it, what actually happens is
that you tend to run the motor sort of full out and break it down and you consume more
power.

So instrumenting the motor is a big focus on reducing power.

Our focus is on the high end AC and servo motor applications.

These are the most critical loops.

There's two approaches that are typically taken with these devices.

One is to use a Hall Effects sensor and SAR ADC as the primary control loop.

Another is to use an optically isolated sigma-delta approach.

So, the reason for this is that, on these big AC and servo motors, you're talking about
a very high common mode voltage.

And so you got to have some way of isolating our analog components from that high
voltage.

Our focus in our webinar is going to be on the Hall effect and SAR.

That's our best solution for the application.

So we talk about those kinds of applications.

So the focus in the webinar that you will be able to see online very shortly is really
on two areas, the AC motors where we're looking at an ADC

and a Hall effect sensor to focus on the primary signal path solution to control the
motor, and then also that same ADC used as part of a servo motor.

So a servo motor is an AC motor with an encoder or resolver on it.

So you're actually doing a little bit finer control, but it needs some additional
measurement.

So in that presentation, the webinar, we talked about why motor control sensing is
important, we took a look at AC motor sensing, servo motor sensing.

We looked at something called low side sensing, lower cost approach, and we also looked
at high speed motor synchronization, looking at some of your PHY products to control
multiple motors.

ALEX TAN: Sure, absolutely.

HAROLD JOSEPH: So this is an example of the slide from the presentation, and this
focuses on the AC or the servo motor side.

So in this area, you've got a blue arrow identifying an ADC and an op amp that would be
needed to measure an encoder or a resolver.

And an encoder would be either magnetic or optical encoder that they're very accurate.

The term I use in resolver is sort of a winding approach.

It's more robust, it's not as accurate, it can tolerate higher temperatures, so both
are used in servo motor applications.

And then we will go through and identify the op amps and A/Ds required for those
applications.

And as with sensors, we would give you a selection of the products.

The diagrams would give you the best alternative when you look at the diagram on the
previous page, but this would then give you the products that we would recommend for AC

and servo motor applications and some of their major specifications.

ALEX TAN: So we have a set of products then that's fit for these applications.

HAROLD JOSEPH: Yes, absolutely.

In fact, in the center you have the simultaneous sampling ADCs.

So one of the issues we get into in the webinar is that when you do this high side
measurement, the phase relationship between the three phases of the AC current
that drives the motor are very important.

You have to either measure them individually or you can measure two phases
simultaneously and then calculate the third.

And so, typically, the standard approach would be is to do what's called a simultaneous
sampling ADC where you make both measurements on those lines at exactly the same time.

ALEX TAN: Oh, okay, great.

HAROLD JOSEPH: So the next area is data acquisition and factory automation.

So this takes those inputs from the motors, the machine division, the sensors, brings
them back to a data acquisition area, and then through your control networks,

then moves it on up to the final control room.

So this gives us then the whole overview of the factory floor and how we tie things
together.

So in data acquisition, we are again seeing this drive or need for better, finer
control.

And in terms of data acquisition, what that means is we're seeing more distributed
controls, so I/O modules being moved out onto the factory floor closer to the
measurement points.

And then that changes some of the issues about how long lines have to be run and how we
do those applications.

ALEX TAN: Because it's distributed, they have more flexibility.

HAROLD JOSEPH: Well they have more flexibility, but it also means that you're doing
more measurement points oftentimes in an area.

You might not have the issues about maybe noise, about sending signals longer distances
as much, but you have other issues that you have to address as well, so -

ALEX TAN: Okay, well tradeoffs.

HAROLD JOSEPH: Yes.

So we're also seeing the increased need for systems diagnostics to reduce the
maintenance downtime.

And in terms of the solutions, we're looking at National's op amps and ADC solutions
where we would provide both integrated and discrete solutions to allow customers

to develop their own solution for their specific requirement.

So most of our applications right now are discrete solutions, but we are combining them
into integrated solutions that we're going to be bringing out over the next year or so.

In the focus areas, we look at an IO module, both the input side, gathering those
sensor inputs, and the output side, control, so opening up a valve, controlling some
process or flow.

We're looking at data acquisition in terms of single channel and multi-channel, and
I've got a diagram that illustrates that.

Now one of the areas I mentioned in terms of tradeoffs is that when you start looking
at remote versus local, you have an issue about isolation.

Because when you're in a remote location, you might have a measurement being done and
you might shift that signal maybe a thousand feet somewhere.

Well those ground potentials are at different levels, so you would have a requirement
in your data acquisition system where you'd be looking at single channel,

and then you would isolate digitally the output of that ADC before it goes into the
micro controller.

So sometimes, customers are looking for single channel solutions.

Other times, if everything's close together, they can actually use an ADC with a MUX.

And the bottom block shows an ADC where you've got a MUX and you've tied in a variety
of different inputs, a thermocouple in LM35 which is one of our temp sensors,

or a 4 to 20 milliamp loop, which is a kind of a way to send signals around the factory
floor.

ALEX TAN: But you're doing that all with one ADC.

HAROLD JOSEPH: Yes, so with the MUX version.

So we need both to address the applications.

ALEX TAN: Great.

And then, from the control network side, the data that's captured here would then be
sent off of, say, an Ethernet control network that would then take it out to the rest
of the system, right?

HAROLD JOSEPH: Yes.

ALEX TAN: Okay.

HAROLD JOSEPH: Yes, and so a lot of these issues, we face the same kind of concerns you
have with sensors.

Do you have a product that addresses a wide range?

What's the performance requirement?

And so, as part of the presentation, we then go through the particular products that we
need and why they're important.

And here we listed as a sample some of the op amps that you would use in this
application, some of the single-ended ADCs that we have.

We also have some differential products as well as some temperature products.

And, I'm sorry, differential products on the second page here with references and DACS.

So that presentation, which will be out in about a month or so covers a number of
different modules, and then we'll show you the different product configurations.

ALEX TAN: Excellent.

Okay, yes.

HAROLD JOSEPH: So, over to you.

ALEX TAN: So thank you very much for listening through this.

This is just intended to provide an overview, give you a high level understanding of
how these products fit together and what National's play is in the industrial space.

So, the summary here is that the National product line supports a wide range of the
factory automation applications.

We talked specifically about webinars on control networks, sensing, motor control and
machine vision and I/O modules.

Then, these webinars provide solutions that'll give you more information on how to use
these products for the specific applications.

Also, if the material provided, if you have any comments or feedback on the material
provided, we're always very interested in hearing that.

And here's the dates for the factory automation webinars that are coming through.

HAROLD JOSEPH: So you've already done the control networks, sensing is out, motor
control is out.

So by the time they see this, those three should be online, I think.

ALEX TAN: That's right.

And then, following with I/O module and then the machine vision following that, it's
still TBD.

And for more information, you could find these webinars at the URL that's listed on
this page.

Additionally, there are a number of different landing pages that you can go to for more
information about the products that we already discussed today.

And also, here's our contact information.

If you have any questions, please feel free to address us directly.

Thank you very much and we really appreciate your time and hope that this has been
useful for you.

HAROLD JOSEPH: Yes, thank you.

We've enjoyed it and I hope you have, too.

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Subject:	Factory Automation Overview