Microcomputers in Industrial Control Applications

In their thirteen years of existence, microprocessor chips have evolved through four generations. Contemporary 16-bit and 32-bit microprocessors offer sophisticated architectures and powerful instruction sets. However, in many industrial applications, data rates are very high and the control structure has a decentralized configuration. In either case, multiple processors must be used. The major constraint in multiprocessor systems is usually the speed of the interconnection mechanism used for communication between the computing elements. This paper covers several of these issues. First, it compares and contrasts the performance of advanced microprocessors. Second, it discusses a split transaction protocol that mitigates the problem of overloading of the interconnection bus. Third, it describes an interactive tool to model multimicroprocessor systems. Overall this paper enumerates the steps involved in the design of efficient multimicroprocessor-based systems.