Architecture analysis of Advantech's industrial computer

Second, the architecture analysis of the industrial computer

The early industrial computer was a better quality PC. However, with the passage of time, the architecture of the industrial computer has changed substantially, and according to the changes in the user's use environment, it has evolved into the current popular baseplane and plug-in card architecture.

The main advantages of this architecture are as follows:

Reduced maintenance time

With the large number of industrial computers used in industrial sites, motherboard-based systems are inflexible, and the entire motherboard needs to be replaced in order to repair or update the system. To replace the motherboard, you need to unplug all the cards and cables before the motherboard is removed. This leads to increased system downtime during repairs or updates, which is unacceptable in the industrial control field.

So the engineers came up with another way, which was to do away with the motherboard architecture, and instead make the core CPU processing unit on a plug-in card, and the other expansion interfaces on the backplane, which is composed of some connectors and passives. This structure makes system updates and repairs simple with minimal downtime. This design concept has influenced the development of the entire industrial computer. Now, the embedded board of our ECG business group's PC104 bus technology is similar to this concept.

Advantech's first BP-based product appeared in 1991, and in the early days, due to the lack of a PCI bus, this product was based on the ISA bus. Later, when PCI bus technology became the mainstream of PC technology, in 1994, the PICMG organization introduced PCI technology into the passive backplane structure in a timely manner, and formulated the PICMG 1.0 standard based on ISA/PCI technology.

PICMG 1.0 standard

Excellent scalability

In addition to the main advantages of the PICMG 1.0 standard for system updates and repair times described above, there is another major advantage: excellent scalability.

Industrial sites use industrial computers as the control core, and a variety of expansion cards will be connected, mainly early ISA cards and mainstream PCI cards, such as a variety of capture cards and measurement cards in Advantech's IAG department. Depending on the user's needs, the ISA and PCI slots used are also different. For example, some traditional CNC machine tool manufacturers, in order to protect their early investment in ISA technology, will use traditional ISA control cards. Some manufacturers engaged in video surveillance, because the ISA bandwidth can not meet the demanding video bandwidth needs, must use PCI video capture card, but may choose several ISA interface IO cards at the same time to use with the camera PTZ. As a result, users have a variety of requirements for ISA and PCI slots.

The number of PCI and ISA on the traditional commercial motherboard is fixed, and the early motherboard generally only provides 3 PCI and 3 ISA slots due to the area, and later ISA is facing elimination in the civilian market, so many commercial motherboard manufacturers cancel the ISA slot or only provide an ISA slot based on cost considerations. Therefore, for the diversity of industrial control users, the number of slots provided by commercial motherboards is inevitably stretched. The PICMG 1.0 passive backplane standard can provide up to 20 slots, and the number of ISA and PCI provided can also be adjusted according to user needs.

Excellent heat dissipation characteristics

In addition, the use of PICMG 1.0 architecture also contributes to the heat dissipation of the overall system.

Thermal design of the 4U rack chassis

Of course, there are some defects in the physical architecture of the baseplate and insert card, for example, the gold finger is easy to oxidize, and the groove is easy to loosen in the case of vibration, so it is not suitable for those corrosive and vibrating environments. In response to these situations, the industry has launched CompactPCI technology based on the PICMG 2.0 specification, but due to factors such as price and development difficulty, it is difficult for CompactPCI to enter the mainstream market for a period of time. Therefore, Advantech has launched an industrial motherboard series to supplement this situation (the market for industrial and motherboards will be discussed later).

Architecture analysis of Advantech's industrial computer

Architecture analysis of Advantech's industrial computer

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