ARM Community: Simplify Industrial Automation Designs with Comm Protocols on Single Chip! - ARM Community

Industrial automation designers often require popular industrial communications protocols, such as EtherCAT^®, Ethernet/IP, PROFIBUS^®, PROFINET^®, POWERLINK and SERCOS III. Or perhaps they want to create their own communication protocol. Most of these industrial automation designs would require a microcontroller or microprocessor that’s connected through a host interface to an FPGA or an ASIC. Imagine eliminating the FPGA or ASIC and using one chip that contains all the industrial communications protocols you would need for your design.

I bet you’re asking, “How is this possible?” Using an ARM^® Cortex™-A8 processor, combined with an on-chip Programmable Real-time Unit (PRU) interface, provides both master and slave communications functionality to enable these real-time industrial communications protocols. This type of architecture eliminates the need for an ASIC or FPGA and can result in an overall bill of materials cost reduction of as much as 30 percent!

TI’s Sitara™ AM335x ARM Cortex-A8 microprocessors offer this ARM + PRU architecture and several other key, on-chip industrial peripherals — CAN, ADC, USB + PHY and two-port Gigabit Ethernet with IEEE1588 — to enable fast network connectivity and rapid data throughput, as well as connection to sensors, actuators and motor control.

So, what type of industrial applications could you design with these MPUs? Here are a few ideas:

• Drives and I/O level devices targeted to enable sensors, actuators, motor drives, communications modules and gateways needing industrial slave communications
• Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs) that need to control various I/O devices such as electric motors, hydraulic cylinders, magnetic relays, solenoids and more
• Human Machine Interfaces (HMIs) for interactive touch screens on industrial automation interface panels
• And many more!

It’s your turn! How would this unique, one-chip architecture specifically benefit your design?

Guest Partner Blogger:
Srikanth (Srik) Gurrapu, Business Manager for Sitara™ ARM^® Microprocessors - Industrial Automation Markets, Texas Instruments. Gurrapu has been with TI for more than 13 years leading the marketing and business development activities for various embedded processors for consumer, medical, industrial, and high reliability markets. Gurrapu has a Masters of Electrical and Computer Engineering from University Of Kansas. He has two patents in embedded processing architectures and is a member of TI’s technical staff.

ARM welcomes its wealth of Partners in the ARM Connected Community (CC) to submit guest blogs to be published on our multiple community blogs. If interested in participating please submit email inquiries to Tell.Us@arm.com.

The ARM Connected Community (CC) is an extensive ecosystem covering all aspects of ARM-based design, from chip implementation through to system and device design. The CC provides a platform for collaborative innovation, with multiple types of forums for members to work with one another, and with customers, to solve industry challenges, all with the purpose of enabling designers to focus on differentiating features and an accelerated time-to-market for ARM powered solutions.