Featured Articles:
-Using High-Reliability Digital I/O
-I/O Error Monitoring in Industrial Machine Control
-Improving Analog Circuits; and more

Resources & Literature:
-2007 Machine Safeguarding Design Guide
-Feedback Devices
-MooreHawke publishes white paper on Installing Fieldbus in Hazardous Locations; and more

Application Stories:
-Using Isolated Counter/Timer Devices in Industrial Applications
-Wireless networking benefit
-Nuke design: A digital dictum; and more

Featured Training:
-Fieldbus Foundation to conduct Seminar In Brazil
-Practical Hazardous Areas for Engineers and Technicians
-Practical Safety Instrumentation & Emergency Shutdown Systems for Process Industries; and more

Product Announcements:
-AutomationDirect releases analog modules for DirectLOGIC PLCs
-ASI announces high density signal isolators
-Advantech launches PCI-1763UP digital I/O card
-ASI releases CWRE pluggable 6 amp relay; and more

Company News:
-Beckhoff Automation sales increase 26% in 2006
-Dinesh Paliwal leaving ABB
-Yokogawa and MAVERICK sign supplier agreement with Chevron; and more

Application News:
-Virtual I/O: Cemex integrates plant floor devices with MYNAH
-ABB wins $26-million contract in Qatar
-Using Industrial Wireless Ethernet in Mining Systems; and more

Featured Events:
-National Instruments Hosts NIWeek Technical Summit
-Oil and Gas Industry Symposium in 13 cities
-PTO offers Free PROFINET 2007 Developer Workshops; and more

Using High-Reliability Digital I/O
By National Instruments
White paper describes the operation of High-Reliability Digital I/O, demonstrates the features in typical scenarios, and illustrates how to program the features in LabVIEW.

I/O Error Monitoring in Industrial Machine Control
By David Lin, Application Engineer, iC-Haus GmbH
Modern machine-control units are increasingly decentralized in their assembly and have intelligent peripheries addressed by buses. In addition to control of the overall system, the recognition of failures and states on I/O lines is of growing importance as the desire to minimize—or, where possible, totally avoid—costs for service and repairs increases. This is a task that can be assigned to peripheral devices.

Improving Analog Circuits
Design News, June 2007
By Hae-Seung Lee, professor, MIT Microsystems Technology Labs
With MIT’s new analog circuits, power consumption is a lot less. They eliminated the need for op-amps. Instead, they provide the same functionality by using comparators or zero-crossing detectors. Prototypes are built for A/D converters, but they can also be applied to amplifiers, filters or delta sigma modulators.

LTF Technology Simplifies Light Sensing
Control Engineering, June 2007
By Ray King, TAOS
What is a light-to-frequency converter and how does it work?

Using RDMA to increase processing performance
Embedded Computing Design
By William Lee, Mellanox Technologies
Applications are increasing the demand for CPU processing performance and the amount of data being transferred between subsystems. Offloading data movement to I/O hardware increases the amount of CPU resources available for these applications, boosting the system’s performance.

Browse more articles and white papers on the portal.

2007 Machine Safeguarding Design Guide
This 2-volume Machine Safeguarding Design Guide offered by Omron STI includes over 200 pages of engineering and regulation data. The balance of the 1400 pages includes product specifications and selection guides for the following safety products: Light Curtains, Laser Scanners, Mats, Interlocks, Relays, Network Controllers, Contact Strips, Edges, Two Hand Controls, and Enabling Switches.

Feedback Devices
By John Mazurkiewicz, Baldor Electric
Closed loop systems use feedback signals for stabilization, speed and position information. There are a variety of devices to provide this data, such as the analog tachometer, optical encoder, Hall sensor, and resolver. In this tutorial article, each is defined and explained.

MooreHawke publishes white paper on Installing Fieldbus in Hazardous Locations
This paper describes everything you should consider when applying fieldbus in hazardous areas, then shows how it was done. Author uses it in a class he teaches on hazardous environments.

Pepperl+Fuchs publishes AS-Interface Solutions Guide
200+ page resource includes a full color selection guide to assist users in choosing the optimum AS-Interface components.

Safety-Related Position Measuring Systems
White paper from Heidenhein discusses how a safety-related position measuring system can be used as a single-encoder system with a safe control in applications with control category SIL-2 (in accordance with IEC 61 508) or performance level “d” (in accordance with ISO 13 849).

Browse more resources and literature on the portal.

Using Isolated Counter/Timer Devices in Industrial Applications
By National Instruments
Counter-timer modules perform a variety of functions. Typical applications include quadrature encoder measurement, edge detection, frequency measurement, pulse-train and pulse-width-modulated (PWM) signal generation.

Wireless networking benefits
Intech, June 2007
By Dan Bowen and Doug McNeil
A pickle plant opted to install wireless access points with a wireless controller to extend to every possible area of Mt. Olive's manufacturing footprint, including outdoor areas such as its waste water treatment facility and brining tanks.

Nuke design: A digital dictum
Intech, June 2007
By Yangmook Chung, John Stevens, and William J. Gill
This Korean nuclear power plant's approach to standardizing design approaches for reliable I&C technologies could offer suggestions to existing U.S. nuclear plants in upgrading with retrofits and even new plant designs. System has more than 14,000 I/O points.

Connecting 4,000 Data Points
Automation World, May 2007
While plant-to-enterprise connections are becoming more common, much of the use of OPC is internal connections within plants. Sky Harbor International Airport, in Phoenix, Ariz., is an example of using OPC to connect a system to itself.

New DSPs, New Applications
Design News, April 2007
By Charles J. Murray, Senior Technical Editor
In the world of electronics, few components are gaining popularity faster than digital signal processors (DSPs). Because they have such extraordinary number-crunching capabilities, engineers are finding new applications for them, almost on a weekly basis.

Browse more application stories on the portal.

Fieldbus Foundation to conduct Seminar In Brazil
Fieldbus Foundation will present a fieldbus educational seminar on July 12, 2007, at the Renaissance Hotel in São Paulo, Brazil.

Practical Hazardous Areas for Engineers and Technicians
IDC Technologies, UK
This workshop will provide you with a solid grounding in the principles of explosion protection and intrinsic safety

Practical Safety Instrumentation & Emergency Shutdown Systems for Process Industries
IDC Technologies, UK
Workshop introduces managers, engineers and technicians to standards and practices for safety instrumented systems and Emergency Shutdown systems for the protection of hazardous processes.

Lee College offers Foundation Fieldbus Course for power and wire installers
The Fieldbus Center at Lee College, a National Science Foundation (NSF) recognized and funded institution, is offering a FOUNDATION fieldbus training course for power and wire installers. The two-day course covers installation and testing of fieldbus physical layer components.

Browse more training and seminar opportunities on portal.

Browse more Product Announcements on the portal.

Search all Products by keyword, category, manufacturer or release date.

Yokogawa and MAVERICK sign supplier agreement with Chevron  -  06/15/07
Yokogawa and MAVERICK Technologies have been selected as the main automation and control contractors for Chevron’s global refineries.

Mitsubishi expands distribution agreement with Livingston & Haven  -  06/06/07
Livingston & Haven now sells the Mitsubishi Electric Automation product line; it will add the full line of articulated and SCARA robotic products.

Beckhoff Automation sales increase 26% in 2006  -  05/17/07
During 2006, the company had sales of 190 million euros.

Dinesh Paliwal leaving ABB  -  05/10/07
Dinesh Paliwal, President, will leave ABB at the end of June.

Moore Industries Promotes Charles Larson to Director of Technology  -  05/09/07
Larson will provide a bridge between Marketing and Engineering to help develop and optimize the commercial exploitation of Moore's intellectual property.

ABB creates engineering and science education foundation  -  05/04/07
ABB will create a foundation with total funding of $16.6 million to sponsor talented and needy students in engineering and natural sciences.

Sadlowski named Chief Executive Officer for Siemens  -  05/03/07
Siemens appointed Dennis Sadlowski President and CEO, succeeding Aubert Martin, who is retiring.

Browse more company and organizational news on the portal.

Virtual I/O: Cemex integrates plant floor devices with MYNAH
Control Engineering -- June 6, 2007
Cemex, the world’s largest producer of ready-mix concrete, has chosen MYNAH’s virtual I/O module (VIM) network gateway to integrate plant floor devices at its cement plants.

ABB wins $26-million contract in Qatar
ABB received a $26 million order as the Main Instrumentation and Main Electrical Contractor for two oil platforms being built for Maersk Oil Qatar.

Using Industrial Wireless Ethernet in Mining Systems
A mine uses a combination of Moxa's AWK-1100 wireless AP/Bridge/AP Client and an industrial Ethernet switch.

Emerson supplies equipment to New Zealand M&C school  
Emerson products will be used at the Industrial Measurement and Control (IMC) training laboratory at New Zealand's Waikato Institute of Technology. The college is the only provider of IMC training at Level 4 and Level 5 of the New Zealand Qualifications Authority National Framework.

Invensys supplying Foxboro DCSes to ethanol refineries in Canada  
Invensys is providing Foxboro I/A Series distributed control systems (DCS) for two new Husky Energy grassroots ethanol refineries in western Canada. Each of the two new plants will produce 130 million litres (34.3 million gallons) of ethanol annually, to be blended up to 10 percent into gasoline products.

National Instruments Hosts NIWeek Technical Summit
Technical summits on graphical system design; RF and wireless communications; sound and vibration; and vision will take place at NIWeek 2007, starting August 7.

Oil and Gas Industry Symposium in 13 cities
One day free symposiums run from May 8 in Norway to Nov 8 in Argentina. It includes technology presentations and case studies on how companies in the oil and gas industry have applied the latest measurement and control technologies in service, drilling, distributed measurements and oil field inventory management applications.

PTO offers Free PROFINET 2007 Developer Workshops
One-day Workshops will be held in 2007 on July 31 in Scottsdale, AZ and a date to be determined in October in Boston, MA. The Workshops will provide potential PROFINET device developers, development managers and product marketers with a wide range of technical information, including PROFINET vendor presentations.

ISA Wireless Conference July 23-24 in Vancouver
"Wireless Solutions for Manufacturing Automation: Insights for Technology and Business Success," will be held 23-24 July 2007 at the Marriott Vancouver Airport in Richmond, BC, Canada.

RapidIO Design Summits in Fall 2007
Global RapidIO Design Summits will be held in Europe, Asia and the U.S., starting in Munich, Germany, on September 17. Cities to be visited include Paris, Boston, Seoul, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Hyderabad, with the tour ending in Bangalore on November 15, 2007

SAME 2007 Forum
October 3-4, 2007 Sophia Antipolis, France
SAME 2007 Forum (Sophia Antipolis Forum on MicroElectronics) provides an exceptional venue for discussions and demonstrations with the opportunity to meet exhibitors displaying microelectronics related products.

Rick Zabel
Vice President, Publisher
Automation.com

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