Articles and News

Frost & Sullivan has selected ABB as the recipient of its 2006 South Asian Technology Leadership Award for Process Automation Suppliers. The award recognizes ABB for the outstanding performance and technological advances of its Industrial IT Extended Automation System 800xA.

Lantronix announces four new products and signs Neteon Technologies, Inc., as a sales partner.

National Instruments reported record revenue in Q3 2006 of $164 million, a 16 percent increase over Q3 2005. Revenue was up 11 percent in the Americas, up 14 percent in Europe and up 30 percent in Asia.

Power Efficiency Corporation was featured in a news article on CNET highlighting the Company’s energy efficiency technology for electric motors. CNET is a news website where people go to discover the latest in technology and consumer electronics.

At this week’s Automation Fair event in Baltimore, Rockwell Automation showcases its broad portfolio of safety products and solutions designed to help manufacturers deploy safety systems that help achieve their production goals and increase safety for employees. From simple relays and sensors to fully integrated control systems, Rockwell Automation offers the tools and expertise to help manufacturers shape their safety solutions to support both manufacturing and safety goals.

Rockwell Automation unveiled the expansion of its Integrated Architecture production control and information system, including significant additions to the Logix Control Platform and FactoryTalk integrated production and performance suite. The additional functionality further aides real-time information exchange between production and the rest of the enterprise, improving user responsiveness, increasing productivity and safety, while reducing development, commissioning and operational costs.

Rockwell Automation announced that it has formed the FactoryTalk Information Solution Provider Program, an initiative that will result in an extended network of approved information systems professionals to help manufacturers build successful plant-wide information applications and manufacturing execution systems (MES) using the FactoryTalk integrated production and performance suite.

Rockwell Automation is showcasing their overall system capabilities including batch tools, safety systems, advanced process control capabilities and migration solutions for legacy PLCs and DCS systems. In addition, Rockwell Automation is discussing its partnership with Endress+Hauser, one of the world’s leading suppliers of process instruments, and unveiling migration plans for legacy DCS systems.

Sales for the third quarter of 2006 totaled €3,480 million, up 15.3% from the year-earlier period. Acquisitions (primarily Juno Lighting, BEI Technologies, Merten and Clipsal Asia) contributed €216 million, or 7.1% of growth for the period.

KUKA Robotics awarded its top system partner awards to AMEC, Forte Automation Systems and AMF Automation Technologies. AMEC received the Innovation Award 2006, Forte Automation Systems received the System Partner of the Year 2006 award; and AMF Automation Technologies received the New Partner of the Year 2006 award.

ArchestrA Bulk Import Utility 1.0 simplifies the conversion of legacy system applications to Wonderware's Industrial Application Server, which is built on the ArchestrA software architecture and improves the productivity and maintenance of industrial information and automation systems. The ArchestrA Bulk Import Utility is available at no charge for use with a Wonderware development license and the Industrial Application Server 2.1 Patch 01 or higher.

Under the terms of the five year OEM agreement, which Symbol will be Datalogic’s exclusive supplier of laser scan engines and provide wireless technology. The contract’s total value is currently estimated to be up to $60-75 million over the five year term.

Ceyrolle will be responsible for managing Cognex's direct sales organization as well as all of its channel sales worldwide for the company's Modular Vision Systems Division, the largest division at Cognex.

BHP Billiton's Yabulu Nickel Refinery and has signed a AUD $2.1 million dollar contract for the final stage of a boiler upgrade initiative at the nickel and cobalt processing operation near Townsville (Queensland, Australia). This latest deal represents the final stage of an AUD $10.4 million enterprise relationship between Matrikon and BHP Billiton.

The new facility will house and safeguard a substantial part of the UK's national collection of books and journals, currently requiring an additional 12.5 km (7.7 miles) of shelving space per year. The storage unit incorporates 262 linear km (163 miles) of high-density, fully automated storage in a low-oxygen environment.

Thr ISA-SP99 Industrial Automation and Control Systems Security committee plans to issue its first two standards and an updated guideline for committee voting -- while launching a new working group to develop another key standard in the ISA-99 series.

ISA's SP100 Wireless standards committee plans to merge two working groups, ISA SP100.11 and SP100.14. ISA SP100.11, which covers industrial process measurement and control, and ISA SP100.14, which focuses on optimized solutions for industrial monitoring, will be combined into ISA SP100.11a, a new working group.

ISA has been selected by the US Department of Commerce to participate in its upcoming Business Mission to India. The Commerce Department's International Trade Administration will host a U.S. delegation to the India Business Summit November 29-30, 2006.

Emerson Process Management, a business of Emerson (NYSE:EMR), announced that the company has been awarded a contract to provide PlantWeb digital plant architecture and engineering support for the construction of multi-feedstock biodiesel refineries by BioSource America, Inc., a wholly-owned subsidiary of Nova Biosource Fuels, Inc. (OTC: NVAO).

Alarm Analytics helps customers utilize industry standards-based alarm management, reporting and analysis within a familiar Microsoft Excel environment. Alarm Analytics provides users with 15 industry standard reports for quick presentation of KPIs such as alarm distribution, tag frequency/chattering, cross-correlations, operator response time and operator changes by interval.

Flowserve has received two awards from Frost & Sullivan honoring its market leadership in the pump sector. The two awards cite Flowserve's excellence in providing superior value to its customers and its global penetration in the oil and gas industry.

ICONICS was nominated for Microsoft Corp.’s Partner of the Year Award for Sales and Marketing in ISV/Software Solutions. Nominations were announced at the recent Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference.

ICONICS receives two patents for technology used in MobileHMI wireless mobile Web telephony software and Pocket GENESIS, mobile Pocket PC industrial software, and DataWorX32 Data Aggregation and Redundancy technology.

ICONICS is celebrating 20 years of providing Web-enabled, OPC-based, HMI/SCADA Visualization and Manufacturing Intelligence software for Microsoft Windows operating systems.

Invensys Process Systems has been awarded a project by Petrofac Facilities Management to enable migration of the aging Emerson Fisher Provox system on the Kittiwake production platform in the central North Sea to a new Foxboro I/A Series process control system. This is the second process control project awarded to Invensys by Petrofac in recent years.

Taiwan Power Company (Taipower) will implement I/A Series distributed control systems (DCS) from Foxboro for a hydro power generation and pumped storage automation upgrade project. Located at the 1,088-megawatt Takuan Hydro Power Station in Nantau County in central Taiwan, the new implementation will utilize the Foxboro high-speed mesh control network backbone to maximize system availability and reliability.

Dr. James Truchard gave the keynote address Oct. 16 at the National Science Foundation-sponsored Workshop on Cyber-Physical Systems in Austin, Texas. This new government research area involves computer-based systems that exhibit a deeply integrated, real-time interaction between computer and physical components.

Opto 22 named Mark Engman President and CEO effective immediately. Engman succeeds his father, Opto 22 founder Robert (Bob) Engman, who will continue with the company in a consultative and advisory role.

WINA will join the Automation Federation as a charter member. WINA is a coalition of industrial end-user companies, technology suppliers, industry organizations, software developers, system integrators, and others interested in the advancement of wireless solutions for industry.

ISA's Executive Board voted today to provide a new member benefit of free downloadable ISA-developed standards. ISA Members will be able to download (in PDF form) any ISA standard for free as of January 1, 2007.

Emerson will be sponsoring speakers at several upcoming trade gatherings to educate the industry on the risks and issues associated with salvaged, remanufactured and surplus equipment. It will work with FM Approvals and others to spread the word that such equipment may not be entitled to bear the FM NRTL mark

Ethernet Direct is cooperating with KTS Optonics Co. Ltd., to set up Ethernet Direct Korea. KTS Optonics was established in 2001 as a fiber optic product supplier, and grown to be the leading supplier of fiber and networking products in Korea.

GE Fanuc signed a marketing agreement with SAP to jointly market GE Fanuc Production Management solutions and SAP applications, easing plant floor and enterprise integration. This relationship allows both companies to leverage each other’s strengths to meet the needs of customers in important Americas markets.

Devon Energy Corporation eas recognized for Innovation and Excellence in SCADA applications for Oil and Gas. The presentation was made during ISA Expo at the Control Microsystems booth.

To fulfill requirements for a wide variety of customers, Air Purity is achieved via incorporation of Oil-Free Rotary Screw, Oil-Less Scroll & Oil-Free Vortex Blower compressor technologies. Hitachi’s Air Technology Group Products are incorporated into many market applications such as medical, food & beverage, pharmaceutical, electronics, etc. With nearly 100 years of experience in air compression, Hitachi is able to provide the customer with proven, reliable and efficient options.

Thermo Electron will showcase its full complement of process control products in booth #1332 at the ISA Expo in Houston, Texas from October 17-19, 2006. At the ISA Expo, Thermo’s booth will feature process analyzers, air, gas and liquid flowmeters, density meters, and level sensors.

Verano expanded the worldwide distribution network for its security event management solution, Industrial Defender, with the addition of six new resellers in EMEA and Australia. New partners include ATGS in Russia, CSE-Uniserve in Australia, Emte Sistemas in Spain, Ferranti in Belgium, Qpit in the Netherlands and Vision Automation in Italy.

Siemens will display its Totally Integrated Automation in all levels from Process Analytics and Process Instrumentation to Process Control. Siemens will also showcase the PCS 7 integrated control & safety system platform that has been selected by several major oil & gas and chemical companies for both new and modernization projects.

KUKA has been selected by Dyco Inc. as its robotics supplier for its new robotic bulk palletizer system. Dyco will use the KUKA KR 180 PA palletizing robot fitted with head tooling in its robotic bulk palletizing system which will give manufacturers the flexibility to palletize multiple empty plastic bottles and bottle configurations with minimal downtime between change over.

Wonderware achieved certification from the Support Center Practices (SCP) certification program for the fourth consecutive year. Wonderware again met the SCP compliance requirements, as well as the SCP community benchmark average.

ISA's new standards committee that is working to adopt the generic device description language specified by IEC 61804 for device integration has released its first committee draft for ballot. The Electronic Device Description Language is used to create an Electronic Device Descriptions (EDD) file for intelligent devices to integrate these with control systems and portable tools.

The JTRS SDR development kit, jointly developed by Xilinx and ISR Technologies, is the industry’s first to support partial reconfiguration within the complete Software Communications Architecture (SCA). This makes it the first complete SCA development platform for developing, verifying and demonstrating any waveform on a SCA-enabled System-on-a-Chip (SoC) platform using partial reconfiguration in a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA). ORB express RT serves as the sole Object Request Broker (ORB) supported by the JTRS SDR Kit.

The US Patent Office issued seven patents to Sionex for devices used in the detection of industrial chemicals, explosives and chemical warfare agents. Sionex was founded in 2001 with technology exclusively licensed from The Charles Stark Draper Laboratory.

Atmel and Tendril will integrate and bundle Atmel’s AVR® Z-Link™ 802.15.4/ZigBee™ hardware solution and Tendril’s network operations platform software for WSCN – enabling customers to integrate and deploy the Atmel wireless networking platform with IP networks, PC/PDA-based applications and other aspects of enterprise computing systems.

ICS Triplex has chosen the Green Hills Platform for Industrial Safety for its next generation of safety-rated, fault-tolerant control and safety systems. The Green Hills software allows ICS Triplex to design and deliver control systems that meet and exceed international safety standards.

RTA-OSEK RTOS has been integrated with the MULTI integrated development environment (IDE). Developers of automotive ECU software can now reduce their development time, produce code with fewer bugs and lower their production cost.

Intermec's Oct. 24 60-minute live webcast webinar covers Engine and Component Tracking: Logistics and Error Proofing with RFID. It will be conducted by Tech Center President Chuck Boyles, Bradford Beale of Comtrol and Intermec's Mike Fisher.

Junot Systems and Loftware have signed a letter of intent to integrate Loftware’s Loftware Print Server (LPS) application with SAP® R/3® and mySAP® using Junot Systems’ patented NLINK® product suite with its SAP-certified interfaces.

Designed to make RF power measurements in both field and R&D lab environments, the compact Model 3500 provides the accuracy of a benchtop RF power meter with the convenience of a portable instrument at half the cost of competing products. With a wide frequency range of 10MHz to 6GHz, the Model 3500 is useful in a variety of applications, including test of mobile phone and cellular infrastructures, WLAN devices, RFID readers, WiMax devices, and wireless sensors.

Danaher Motion has signed two new Automated Guided Vehicle (AGV) technology partners - the US group Jervis B. Webb Company (Farmington Hills, MI), and TTS Port Equipment AB from Sweden. Central to this strategic cooperative venture is Danaher Motion’s NDC8 control platform, to be used by both companies in their AGV solutions. AGVs that feature NDC8 technology are particularly easy to manage, maintain, reconfigure and expand, while reducing total cost of ownership.