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Rockwell* Automation Case Study |
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With well-known brands like Allen-Bradley* controls, Reliance Electric* motors and drives, Rockwell Software, and Dodge* mechanical power transmission products, Rockwell Automation is an established worldwide leader in power, control and information solutions for industrial automation. The company's products are deployed in a variety of automated settings, including factories, industrial facilities, amusement parks, Broadway shows, airports, hospitals and more. |
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| Rockwell Automation creates the systems that control and drive the automated environment, including programmable controllers, drives and actuators, human-machine interface, sensors and application software. Many of these products are deployed in rugged conditions with rapidly moving parts and machinery, high amounts of vibration, airborne contaminants, high humidity and wide temperature fluctuations. The company is at the leading edge of the industry with automation solutions that allow valuable information from the plant floor to be shared with the rest of the enterprise for real-time decision making.
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| Like other developers today, Rockwell Automation works continually to lower costs and speed time-to-market to stay competitive. At the same time, engineers must improve upon the specialized technologies that make Rockwell Automation a global leader in automation solutions. To balance this Rockwell Automation needs to minimize the work required to develop common components and platforms so that engineers have more time to focus on the company's value add. |
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| Until recently, Rockwell Automation relied on an assortment of general purpose processors and custom ASICs in thousands of different product types to meet the rigorous performance requirements of industrial automation. It was a costly strategy requiring numerous specialty engineering resources. Rockwell Automation designers believe they can achieve significant time and cost efficiencies by moving many of its solutions to a single processing architecture - without sacrificing performance or features. The goal: one platform that can support many of the company's automation solutions produced today, as well as those products Rockwell Automation plans to build in the future.
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| Rockwell Automation's engineers specified exacting criteria for the processing platform. Foremost, it must perform well within the extreme conditions of the industrial setting. Which means the architecture must meet tight requirements with regards to power consumption and reliability, compliance with common and emerging industry standards (like Ethernet, the TCP/IP Suite, and IEEE 1588), and compatibility with multiple operating systems. Built-in networking capabilities like USB are essential, especially in future Rockwell Automation solutions, to enable easy integration with a range of peripheral devices. The company also demands high performance at reasonable cost.
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| Intel network processor architecture meets - and often exceeds - the company's demands. "With Intel we get a combination of very high performance (on a scale of ten-times greater than anything we've used before), our choice of operating system, built-in USB, built-in network processor engines (NPEs), and relatively low power consumption," explains Scot Tutkovics, Software Engineering Manager, Rockwell Automation. |
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| Rockwell Automation is currently developing new automation products using the Intel® IXP465 network processor. But that's only the beginning. "It's our intention to use the Intel IXP465 network processor - and other Intel network processors - in many other solutions going forward," says Brian Oulton, Rockwell Marketing Manager.
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