IEN: What innovations are in store for users of drives, motors, servers, control systems, software, miniaturization, customization, and other motion-related technologies?
Novak: As a manufacturer of compact industrial motion coordinators, Trio Motion Technology sees promising trends in the advancement of low-power processors and FLASH programmable gate arrays. These trends are helping companies like Trio drive down product costs and increase performance of motion controls.
ARM Technology
ARM-based products are now ubiquitous in the world of cell phone and handheld computing devices. Where you may not see ARM processors used is in servo and stepper motion controllers. ARM technology offers many advantages over the traditional DSP and other large-scale processors.
- Low Power Consumption: ARM technology, since it is primarily in battery-operated equipment, uses very low power. A big advantage when designing small plug-in controller cards for existing hardware designs that must supply power to the option cards.
- Plenty of Horsepower: ARM processors also can run clock speeds in the hundreds of MHz, easily accommodating the demands of real-time motion and machine control.
- On-board Memory: Another big advantage of ARM technology is onboard memory. ARM processors have large amounts of FLASH and SRMA memory for user application programs, eliminating the need for additional external memory and reducing cost.
FLASH Gate Array Technology
Gate array technology is nothing new in the world of industrial controllers and motor drives. Recent advances, however, can allow multiple hardware variations on the same physical board.
Easier Customization: With the old gate array technology changing a hardware input and/or output function usually required a new PC board layout, or at the least a reprogrammed and replaced gate array device. Using FLASH reprogrammable gate arrays, inputs and outputs, counters or buffers can be changed without physically altering the original product. This big advantage gives manufacturers the means to quickly provide customized solutions at minimal cost and record time.