Industrial electronics [technology analysis and forecast]

A rapprochement among different vendors of industrial control equipment may be at hand if several systems presented as “open architecture” ones are any indication. Meanwhile, the advent of single-chip microcontrollers for motor drives, more powerful insulated-gate bipolar transistors (IGBTs), and improved integration of sensors with power devices are salient advances on the factory floor. The new crop of industrial computers, including single-board types embedded in larger systems, emphasizes increased power often in a smaller package. As for signal processing, gains include a system for surveillance (in the plant and on the battlefield) that fuses data from two sources into one stream of enhanced precision, while digital signal processing pushes a PC-based vision system to some 10¹¹ operations per second