Un­der the com­pre­hens­ive li­cens­ing agree­ment, Rene­sas will gain ac­cess to EPC’s proven low-voltage eGaN (en­hance­ment mode gal­li­um ni­tride) tech­no­logy and its es­tab­lished sup­ply-chain eco­sys­tem, ac­cel­er­at­ing the ad­op­tion of high-per­form­ance GaN solu­tions across a broad range of mar­kets. EPC and Rene­sas will col­lab­or­ate over the next year to es­tab­lish in­tern­al wafer fab­ric­a­tion cap­ab­il­it­ies for these products. In ad­di­tion, Rene­sas will second-source sev­er­al of EPC’s pop­u­lar GaN devices that are already in mass pro­duc­tion, en­han­cing sup­ply-chain re­si­li­ence for cus­tom­ers.

Broad­er ac­cess to GaN tech­no­logy for cus­tom­ers

As power elec­tron­ics de­sign­ers push for high­er ef­fi­ciency, great­er power dens­ity, and lower car­bon foot­prints, the phys­ic­al lim­its of sil­ic­on in­creas­ingly con­strain per­form­ance and mini­atur­iz­a­tion. Com­pared with sil­ic­on, GaN tran­sist­ors of­fer high­er ef­fi­ciency, faster switch­ing speeds, and sig­ni­fic­antly smal­ler form factors. These ad­vant­ages are re­shap­ing power con­ver­sion ar­chi­tec­tures across ap­plic­a­tions ran­ging from con­sumer elec­tron­ics to AI data cen­ters. This al­li­ance ex­pands cus­tom­er ac­cess to GaN tech­no­logy while provid­ing in­creased sup­ply as­sur­ance through qual­i­fied second sourcing.

“To­geth­er, EPC and Rene­sas are form­ing a glob­al al­li­ance to de­liv­er state-of-the-art power ef­fi­ciency - cut­ting costs in AI data cen­ters and en­han­cing autonom­ous sys­tems. This is an ex­cit­ing mo­ment for our in­dustry and our com­pany,” said Alex Lid­ow, CEO of EPC. 

“Ex­pand­ing our busi­ness in­to low voltage GaN al­lows us to serve the fast­est grow­ing power seg­ments,” said Ro­han Sam­si, VP, GaN Busi­ness Di­vi­sion at Rene­sas. “This agree­ment with EPC com­ple­ments our es­tab­lished high-voltage 650V+ port­fo­lio and en­ables us to cap­it­al­ize on high-volume mar­kets such as AI power ar­chi­tec­tures from 48V down to 12V and 1V, as well as cli­ent com­put­ing and bat­tery-op­er­ated ap­plic­a­tions.” 

Ad­vantech an­nounced the part­ner­ship with AI EdgeLabs, the pi­on­eer in AI-nat­ive ex­ten­ded runtime se­cur­ity and gov­ernance plat­form for dis­trib­uted mis­sion-crit­ic­al work­loads and in­fra­struc­ture. The part­ner­ship re­in­forces Ad­vantech’s com­mit­ment to in­dus­tri­al cy­ber­se­cur­ity and sup­ports cus­tom­er read­i­ness for evolving European cy­ber­se­cur­ity re­quire­ments, in­clud­ing the Cy­ber Re­si­li­ence Act (CRA) and NIS2.

Dis­trib­uted Edge / IOT op­er­a­tion­al tech­no­logy (OT) en­vir­on­ments play a crit­ic­al role in man­u­fac­tur­ing, trans­port­a­tion, en­ergy, and oth­er es­sen­tial in­dus­tri­al sec­tors. As these sys­tems be­come in­creas­ingly con­nec­ted, they face heightened cy­ber risks while also fall­ing un­der stricter reg­u­lat­ory over­sight. European cy­ber­se­cur­ity reg­u­la­tions are pla­cing new man­dat­ory ob­lig­a­tions on sys­tem op­er­at­ors and product vendors, re­quir­ing con­tinu­ous risk man­age­ment, runtime pro­tec­tion, and demon­strable se­cur­ity con­trols throughout the sys­tem li­fe­cycle.

Re­du­cing the need for third-party tool in­teg­ra­tion

Ad­vantech already im­ple­ments se­cure de­vel­op­ment and hard­ware prac­tices aligned with IEC 62443 stand­ards. By in­teg­rat­ing AI EdgeLabs’ runtime & gov­ernance lay­er, Ad­vantech en­ables en­force­ment of CRA and NIS 2 com­pli­ance for their part­ners and end cli­ents.

“With AI EdgeLabs des­ig­nated as its primary runtime se­cur­ity solu­tion, Ad­vantech will em­bed com­pli­ance-ready se­cur­ity cap­ab­il­it­ies across se­lec­ted edge and in­dus­tri­al plat­forms, re­du­cing the need for cus­tom­ers to in­teg­rate ad­di­tion­al third-party se­cur­ity tools to meet reg­u­lat­ory ob­lig­a­tions. This a stra­tegic move for us” said Alicja Strzemieczna, Sales Dir­ect­or Man­u­fac­tur­ing and In­fra­struc­ture Sec­tor at Ad­vantech Europe.

“Reg­u­la­tions like CRA and NIS2 re­quire se­cur­ity con­trols that op­er­ate con­tinu­ously, not just at design or de­ploy­ment time,” said Inna Ush­akova, CEO at AI EdgeLabs. “Work­ing with Ad­vantech al­lows us to bring runtime se­cur­ity and com­pli­ance cap­ab­il­it­ies dir­ectly in­to in­dus­tri­al and edge plat­forms used in crit­ic­al en­vir­on­ments.”
 

The fo­cus at this area of the fair will be on AI-based per­cep­tion sys­tems, autonom­ous mo­bile ma­nip­u­lat­ors, and hu­manoid ro­bots. Their ad­vant­age over clas­sic in­dus­tri­al ro­bots lies less in their pure per­form­ance and more in their ad­apt­ab­il­ity: they are de­signed to use tools, work­sta­tions, and in­fra­struc­tures de­veloped by people. This en­ables pro­cesses to be auto­mated or modi­fic­a­tions made to es­tab­lished pro­ced­ures and products without hav­ing to re­build the en­tire pro­duc­tion en­vir­on­ment. In the clas­sic fields of auto­ma­tion such as auto­mot­ive or elec­tron­ics pro­duc­tion, spe­cial­ized in­dus­tri­al ro­bots with great­er ac­cur­acy, speed, pay­load, and re­li­ab­il­ity will con­tin­ue to oc­cupy the high ground for the time be­ing. Many ad­vances on the soft­ware side are also ex­pec­ted in the field of ro­bot­ics. In ad­di­tion to im­proved di­git­al twins through data-driv­en meth­ods, as­pects such as sim­u­la­tion and vir­tu­al com­mis­sion­ing are be­com­ing more prom­in­ent as a means for pro­gram­ming or teach­ing ro­bots more quickly – without in­ter­rupt­ing pro­duc­tion.

Among the ex­hib­it­ors in the Ap­plic­a­tion Park are:

Du­at­ic AG from Switzer­land will be among the ex­hib­it­ing com­pan­ies. The com­pany is show­cas­ing a ver­sat­ile, vis­ion-en­abled semi-hu­manoid ro­bot de­signed for dy­nam­ic ma­nip­u­la­tion and autonom­ous nav­ig­a­tion. It of­fers ad­vanced dex­ter­ity and pre­cise move­ment, e.g. in in­t­ra­lo­gist­ics. Du­at­ic's hu­man-sized mo­bile dual-arm ro­bots are tailored to in­dus­tri­al re­quire­ments, and are char­ac­ter­ized by a unique mod­u­lar ar­chi­tec­ture that en­ables easy main­ten­ance and low op­er­at­ing costs. The ro­bots are de­signed for heavy-duty cycles and of­fer high pay­loads and long op­er­at­ing times without re­quir­ing any changes to the in­fra­struc­ture. 

Hexagon, well-known for the activ­it­ies in meas­ure­ment tech­no­lo­gies, will be present­ing its AE­ON hu­manoid ro­bot at HAN­NOV­ER MESSE. AE­ON com­bines sensors from Hexagon with ad­vanced mo­bil­ity, AI-driv­en mis­sion con­trol, and spa­tial in­tel­li­gence to de­liv­er agil­ity, ver­sat­il­ity, and per­cep­tion. This com­bin­a­tion en­ables AE­ON to be used for a wide range of in­dus­tri­al ap­plic­a­tions: from pick­ing up spe­cif­ic ob­jects and scan­ning in­dus­tri­al com­pon­ents for in­spec­tion pur­poses to cre­at­ing di­git­al twins. Thanks to a bat­tery change mech­an­ism that takes just 25 seconds, AE­ON does not need to be re­charged to con­tin­ue work­ing.

In­nok Ro­bot­ics will be show­cas­ing the new IN­DUR­OS fam­ily (350s, 700, 700s, 1300) at HAN­NOV­ER MESSE 2026. In­nok thus of­fers a clearly gradu­ated AMR port­fo­lio – the right AI-sup­por­ted trans­port ro­bot for every ma­ter­i­al flow up to the 1.3 met­ric tonne class. The trade fair high­light in the Ap­plic­a­tion Park in Hall 26 will be the new fleet man­ager in the In­nok autonomy plat­form, In­nok Cock­pit for cent­ral­ized plan­ning, con­trol and op­tim­iz­a­tion of com­plete In­nok ro­bot fleets. 

Tech­man Ro­bot, a glob­al lead­er in col­lab­or­at­ive ro­bots (co­bots), will un­veil its "AI Vis­ion Fly­ing Trig­ger" sys­tem at HAN­NOV­ER MESSE. Deeply in­teg­rated with the NVIDIA Om­ni­verse plat­form, this cut­ting-edge solu­tion un­der­scores Tech­man Ro­bot’s lead­er­ship in AI ro­bot­ics and de­liv­ers a re­volu­tion­ary smart man­u­fac­tur­ing solu­tion tailored to the European mar­ket’s dual de­mands for zero de­fects and high ef­fi­ciency. The high­light of Tech­man Ro­bot's show­case is the prac­tic­al ap­plic­a­tion of Di­git­al Twin tech­no­logy. The sys­tem al­lows for the pre­cise sim­u­la­tion and op­tim­iz­a­tion of the ro­bot's high-speed mo­tion paths and AI vis­ion al­gorithms in a vir­tu­al en­vir­on­ment be­fore phys­ic­al de­ploy­ment.

If you want to meet the spe­cial­ists at HAN­NOV­ER MESSE, you can re­gister for a free tick­et on the fair web­site: ht­tps://www.han­nov­er­messe.de/en/ap­plic­a­tion/re­gis­tra­tion/dir­ect-entry-tick­ets-passes?code=On­hAp

Ro­hde & Schwarz in­vites the glob­al EMC com­munity to its vir­tu­al con­fer­ence De­mys­ti­fy­ing EMC 2026, fo­cus­ing on new reg­u­la­tions, emer­ging test meth­ods, and faster, more ef­fi­cient EMC test­ing. In­ter­act­ive ses­sions will provide prac­tic­al, step-by-step demon­stra­tions.

Key­note: Nav­ig­at­ing EMC test­ing in the age of AI and 6G

Arthi Krish­namurthy, EMC Seg­ment Man­ager at Ro­hde & Schwarz, will high­light how AI, 6G, and ad­vanced ma­ter­i­als de­mand high­er‑fre­quency test­ing, up­dated stand­ards, and more ef­fi­cient test meth­ods to fu­ture‑proof EMC prac­tices.

The con­fer­ence will cov­er up­dates to CIS­PR stand­ards for emis­sions above 1 GHz, Draft CIS­PR 32 Edi­tion 3 pro­pos­als, APD weight­ing tech­niques, re­ver­ber­a­tion cham­ber test­ing, and fun­da­ment­als of con­duc­ted RF im­munity per IEC 61000‑4‑6. Ad­di­tion­al ses­sions in­clude auto­mot­ive EMC in re­ver­ber­a­tion cham­bers, high‑fre­quency GaN‑FET meas­ure­ments, and EMC com­pli­ance for UAVs. Ac­cel­er­at­ing EMI test­ing DE­MC 2026 will show how op­tim­ized setups and mod­ern re­ceiv­ers re­duce test time, in­tro­duce tech­niques like the Vi­brat­ing In­trins­ic Re­ver­ber­a­tion Cham­ber (VIRC), and present res­ults for a new an­tenna design sup­port­ing ra­di­ated EMI test­ing up to 44 GHz.

In­ter­act­ive ses­sions

Hands‑on we­binars will guide at­tendees through EMC meas­ure­ment pre­par­a­tion, in­clud­ing an EMI de­bug­ging demo on a di­git­al‑dis­play cof­fee ma­chine and a ses­sion cla­ri­fy­ing mis­con­cep­tions in tran­si­ent im­munity test­ing (IEC 61000‑4‑X).

More in­form­a­tion on the event, speak­ers and re­gis­tra­tion can be found here: ht­tps://www.ro­hde-schwarz.com/de­mc/

The meas­ure­ment tech­no­logy man­u­fac­turer and II­oT solu­tion pro­vider WIKA has held a stake in Asystom since 2024. As the ma­jor­ity share­hold­er, WIKA now in­tends to play an even more act­ive role in shap­ing the com­pany’s stra­tegic dir­ec­tion. The glob­al net­work of WIKA sub­si­di­ar­ies is to strengthen the sales and ser­vi­cing of the Asystom solu­tions – for ex­ample for in­stall­a­tion. WIKA will also use its re­search and de­vel­op­ment re­sources to col­lab­or­ate with Asystom on the con­tinu­ous de­vel­op­ment of its port­fo­lio.

Asystom de­vel­ops ad­vanced sensors and in­tel­li­gent solu­tions for the re­mote mon­it­or­ing of in­dus­tri­al sys­tems. The com­pany’s core of­fer­ing is based on em­bed­ded acous­tic and vi­bra­tion data pro­cessing tech­no­lo­gies, com­bined with AI-driv­en ana­lyt­ics and dia­gnost­ic tools that en­able con­tinu­ous ma­chine health mon­it­or­ing. Multi­s­ensor in­stru­ments sup­port sig­nal ac­quis­i­tion, while the II­oT soft­ware lay­er ana­lyses the data and de­tects de­vi­ations us­ing ma­chine learn­ing. This en­ables com­pan­ies in the pro­cess and man­u­fac­tur­ing in­dus­tries to identi­fy an­om­alies at an early stage and per­form tar­geted main­ten­ance on their sys­tems. Users can there­fore avoid costly fail­ures and or­gan­ise their main­ten­ance pro­cesses much more ef­fi­ciently.

“WIKA sees it­self as a driver for the de­vel­op­ment of pi­on­eer­ing II­oT tech­no­lo­gies,” says Thomas Hasen­oehrl, WIKA’s Vice Pres­id­ent II­oT Sys­tems & Solu­tions. “The ma­jor­ity stake in Asystom is an­oth­er stra­tegic mile­stone in this re­gard. The II­oT of­fers enorm­ous op­tim­isa­tion po­ten­tial for the in­dustry, par­tic­u­larly in the field of pre­dict­ive main­ten­ance. With its in­nov­at­ive, scal­able solu­tion, Asystom com­ple­ments our part­ner net­work per­fectly.”

Pierre Nac­cache, Asystom’s CEO, says: “In­dus­tri­al play­ers need solu­tions that stand the test of time. With WIKA, we com­bine glob­al de­ploy­ment cap­ab­il­it­ies and a shared tech­no­logy vis­ion to de­liv­er a com­plete, in­teg­rable and scal­able ap­proach that brings to­geth­er sensors, con­nectiv­ity, soft­ware and ser­vices, ad­dress­ing in­dus­tri­al needs in the short, me­di­um and long term. Our am­bi­tion goes bey­ond pre­dict­ive main­ten­ance alone: we want to provide an open and fu­ture-proof found­a­tion for col­lect­ing, pro­cessing and turn­ing in­dus­tri­al sensor data in­to ac­tion­able value at scale.”

Think­Cir­cu­lar­ity ini­tially fo­cuses on plastic re­cyc­ling. Each Think­Top con­tains 500 grams of plastic, and the pi­lot project has demon­strated that this ma­ter­i­al can be re­cycled to pro­duce new units without com­prom­ising qual­ity. Tests con­firm that the mix of re­used and vir­gin plastic in fu­ture units meets all per­form­ance stand­ards – from tensile strength to dur­ab­il­ity. 
Fur­ther­more, oth­er ma­ter­i­als and com­pon­ents from the Think­Tops – such as valu­able metals and elec­tron­ics – are re­spons­ibly re­cycled. 

”Cir­cu­lar think­ing is not just a buzzword for us – it is a re­spons­ib­il­ity,” says In­ger By­gum, Head of Sus­tain­ab­il­ity at Alfa Lav­al Hy­gien­ic Flu­id Hand­ling and Heat Trans­fer Tech­no­lo­gies. “With Think­Cir­cu­lar­ity, we en­sure that ma­ter­i­als from old Think­Tops can be re­used, re­cycled or dis­posed of in the most re­spons­ible and value-cre­at­ing man­ner.”

First units re­turned

In food, dairy and pharma in­dus­tries, there is an on­go­ing fo­cus on pro­cess op­tim­iz­a­tion and re­source sav­ings. For in­stance, by up­grad­ing their ex­ist­ing Think­Top con­trol units, which can save 90% on wa­ter and en­ergy used for clean­ing-in-place. This is also the case in Nor­way, where Skala, the Alfa Lav­al Mas­ter Dis­trib­ut­or, spe­cial­izes in ser­vi­cing hy­gien­ic in­dus­tries. They re­cently in­tro­duced the Think­Cir­cu­lar­ity take-back scheme to their cus­tom­ers and have already sent back sev­er­al hun­dred units.

“Our cus­tom­ers care about wa­ter and en­ergy ef­fi­ciency – and sus­tain­ab­il­ity,” says Owe Barsten, Re­spons­ible Man­ager at Skala Com­pon­ents. “Up­grades mean that older units are scrapped, but now we can of­fer a truly cir­cu­lar solu­tion where old Think­Tops give life to the next gen­er­a­tion.” 

First step in a broad­er cir­cu­lar­ity strategy

Key ele­ments in Alfa Lav­al’s cir­cu­lar­ity strategy in­clude design­ing products for dur­ab­il­ity, high ef­fi­ciency and long life­time. With Think­Cir­cu­lar­ity, the com­pany now closes the loop by of­fer­ing an end-of-life solu­tion that en­sures that old products are scrapped re­spons­ibly and new products in the fu­ture can be made from re­cycled plastic. In­ger By­gum em­phas­izes that this pi­lot project is only the start: 
“Re­cyc­ling plastic from old Think­Tops is just a small drop in a vast ocean of cir­cu­lar op­por­tun­it­ies. Still, this pi­lot project is im­port­ant to us and has taught us valu­able les­sons that will help us de­vel­op new busi­ness mod­els, part­ner­ships and meth­ods to scale re­use and re­cyc­ling.”  

So far, the Think­Cir­cu­lar­ity ini­ti­at­ive has been launched in se­lec­ted European coun­tries.

Soft­ing In­dus­tri­al is now a cer­ti­fied part­ner of IN­SYS icom, suc­ceed­ing DELTA LO­GIC Auto­mat­is­ier­ung­s­tech­nik GmbH, which was ac­quired by Soft­ing In­dus­tri­al in April 2025. The part­ner­ship brings to­geth­er two areas of ex­pert­ise that com­ple­ment each oth­er per­fectly: For more than 40 years, Soft­ing In­dus­tri­al has stood for mod­ern con­nectiv­ity solu­tions in in­dus­tri­al auto­ma­tion and pro­fes­sion­al OT/IT data in­teg­ra­tion. Its products en­sure the ac­quis­i­tion, ag­greg­a­tion, and pro­vi­sion of ma­chine data via se­cure and stand­ard­ized com­mu­nic­a­tion pro­to­cols such as OPC UA and MQTT.

IN­SYS icom con­trib­utes its proven ex­pert­ise as a man­u­fac­turer of in­dus­tri­al routers for se­cure net­work con­nectiv­ity, VPN-based re­mote ac­cess, and the man­age­ment of in­dus­tri­al router fleets (icom Router Man­age­ment).

Ad­ded value for ma­chine build­ers, plant op­er­at­ors, and sys­tem in­teg­rat­ors

The part­ner­ship provides users with con­sist­ent, clearly struc­tured solu­tions for all areas of in­dus­tri­al con­nectiv­ity: Se­cure con­nec­tion of dis­trib­uted sys­tems, struc­tured re­mote ac­cess, and stand­ard­ized col­lec­tion and in­teg­ra­tion of ma­chine data for In­dus­tri­al IoT and In­dustry 4.0 ap­plic­a­tions.

Joint fo­cus on In­dustry 4.0 and In­dus­tri­al IoT

“Part­ner­ing with IN­SYS icom is a lo­gic­al step to provide our cus­tom­ers with even more com­pre­hens­ive solu­tions for In­dustry 4.0, In­dus­tri­al IoT, and re­mote ser­vices,” says Em­rah Acar, Product Man­ager at Soft­ing In­dus­tri­al. “To­geth­er, we make in­dus­tri­al plants more trans­par­ent, ef­fi­cient, and fu­ture proof.”

“With Soft­ing In­dus­tri­al, we have gained a part­ner with ex­tens­ive ex­per­i­ence in in­dus­tri­al data in­teg­ra­tion and auto­ma­tion,” says Anna Wels, Vice Pres­id­ent Project Busi­ness at IN­SYS icom. “To­geth­er, we can of­fer cus­tom­ers end-to-end, se­cure, and scal­able solu­tions for net­work­ing, re­mote main­ten­ance, and In­dus­tri­al IoT ap­plic­a­tions.”
 

The European Chips Skills Academy (EC­SA), a European Uni­on (EU)-fun­ded project co­ordin­ated by SEMI Europe, in col­lab­or­a­tion with in­dustry part­ners AENEAS, EPoSS, and IN­SIDE, an­nounced on Feb­ru­ary 12 that ap­plic­a­tions are open for the ECS Sum­mer School. Tak­ing place from 23 – 28 Au­gust 2026 at the Uni­versity Res­id­en­tial Centre, Uni­versity of Bo­logna, Bertinoro, Italy, the pro­gramme in­vites ap­plic­a­tions from un­der­gradu­ate STEM stu­dents across the EU and as­so­ci­ated coun­tries.

“Pro­grammes such as the ECS Sum­mer School are vi­tal to mo­tiv­at­ing and de­vel­op­ing the next gen­er­a­tion of tal­ent that will sus­tain Europe’s semi­con­duct­or work­force,” said Laith Al­ti­mime, Pres­id­ent of SEMI Europe.

As Europe ac­cel­er­ates its trans­ition to a di­git­ally en­abled fu­ture, de­mand for skilled pro­fes­sion­als in mi­cro­elec­tron­ics and semi­con­duct­or tech­no­lo­gies con­tin­ues to grow. The ECS Sum­mer School of­fers a com­pre­hens­ive, im­mers­ive learn­ing ex­per­i­ence de­signed to equip the next gen­er­a­tion of en­gin­eers, re­search­ers, and in­nov­at­ors with found­a­tion­al and ad­vanced in­sights in­to chip design, semi­con­duct­or fab­ric­a­tion, and em­bed­ded in­tel­li­gent sys­tems.

“The ECS Sum­mer School provides stu­dents with a strong entry point to ac­quire prac­tic­al skills and form valu­able con­nec­tions with in­dustry and aca­demia,” said Patrick Cogez, Tech­nic­al Dir­ect­or at AENEAS and EC­SA lead part­ner for the or­gan­isa­tion of the Sum­mer School.

The cur­riculum spans four core do­mains of mi­cro­elec­tron­ics:

• Semi­con­duct­or Tech­no­logy,

• In­teg­rated Cir­cuit Design,

• Di­git­al Sys­tems and Em­bed­ded In­tel­li­gence,

• In­teg­ra­tion of Elec­tron­ic Sys­tems.

This year’s sum­mer school will be co-or­gan­ized by ABGi and IP­CEI ME/CT. Lec­tures, demon­stra­tions, and in­ter­act­ive activ­it­ies will be de­livered by ex­perts from lead­ing uni­versit­ies, re­search in­sti­tutes, and in­dustry part­ners, com­ple­men­ted by ca­reer testi­mon­ies from en­gin­eers work­ing in the field.

Eli­gib­il­ity & Ap­plic­a­tion De­tails

The Sum­mer School is open to un­der­gradu­ate stu­dents who will have com­pleted at least two years of uni­versity study by the time of the event and who will still have at least one year re­main­ing in their de­gree pro­gramme. Par­ti­cipants must be en­rolled in a STEM (Sci­ence, Tech­no­logy, En­gin­eer­ing, Math­em­at­ics) dis­cip­line at a uni­versity based in the EU or eli­gible as­so­ci­ated coun­try and pos­sess a good com­mand of Eng­lish, as all activ­it­ies will be con­duc­ted in Eng­lish.

Re­gis­tra­tion de­tails, ap­plic­a­tion re­quire­ments, and the full pro­gramme over­view are avail­able on the of­fi­cial ECS Sum­mer School 2026 page.
 

For dec­ades, in­dus­tri­al auto­ma­tion has been built on the simple over­arch­ing prin­ciple that re­li­ab­il­ity comes first. Dis­trib­uted con­trol sys­tems (DCS) have de­livered the de­term­in­ist­ic, real-time con­trol that in­dus­tries de­pend on to keep en­ergy flow­ing, chem­ic­als pro­cessing, ma­ter­i­als mov­ing and goods pro­duced safely and ef­fi­ciently. Today though, that found­a­tion is un­der un­pre­ced­en­ted pres­sure. Mar­ket factors such as volat­il­ity, sus­tain­ab­il­ity tar­gets, cy­ber­se­cur­ity threats, work­force change and the ac­cel­er­at­ing pace of di­git­al in­nov­a­tion are all for­cing in­dus­tries to re­think how auto­ma­tion evolves without jeop­ard­iz­ing op­er­a­tions.

While the ad­vent of In­dustry 4.0 saw the mass ad­op­tion of di­git­al­iz­a­tion, it also high­lighted the lim­ited flex­ib­il­ity of ex­ist­ing sys­tems to ac­com­mod­ate change, es­pe­cially in terms of real­iz­ing the full be­ne­fits of the tech­no­logy. Rap­id de­vel­op­ments in II­oT, cloud, edge and data ana­lyt­ics have blurred the lines between tra­di­tion­ally dis­tinct IT and OT sys­tems. In ad­di­tion, op­er­at­ors have faced the trans­la­tion of big data from field devices and con­nec­ted sys­tems in­to meas­ur­able gains in pro­duc­tion ef­fi­ciency, sus­tain­ab­il­ity and re­si­li­ence.

ABB’s new Auto­ma­tion Ex­ten­ded pro­gram is a dir­ect re­sponse to these chal­lenges. In­stead of need­ing cus­tom­ers to re­place what already works, Auto­ma­tion Ex­ten­ded provides a struc­tured, fu­ture-ready way to mod­ern­ize in­dus­tri­al auto­ma­tion while en­sur­ing con­tinu­ity, pro­tect­ing pri­or in­vest­ments and in­fra­struc­ture and safe­guard­ing mis­sion-crit­ic­al op­er­a­tions.

From tra­di­tion­al DCS to Auto­ma­tion Ex­ten­ded

Mod­ern­iz­a­tion in pro­cess auto­ma­tion has his­tor­ic­ally in­volved dis­rupt­ive sys­tem mi­gra­tions, ma­jor shut­downs or long up­grade cycles that force cus­tom­ers to choose between in­nov­a­tion and op­er­a­tion­al sta­bil­ity. While di­git­al tech­no­lo­gies, in­clud­ing ad­vanced ana­lyt­ics, AI, edge in­tel­li­gence and cloud con­nectiv­ity have prom­ised sig­ni­fic­ant per­form­ance gains, in­teg­rat­ing them in­to leg­acy con­trol en­vir­on­ments has of­ten en­tailed in­creased com­plex­ity and risk.

Auto­ma­tion Ex­ten­ded rep­res­ents a de­cis­ive shift. It is not a new DCS in the tra­di­tion­al sense, nor a bolt-on di­git­al lay­er de­tached from con­trol. In­stead, it is provid­ing new cap­ab­il­it­ies to ABB’s ex­ist­ing auto­ma­tion plat­forms through a mod­ern, open and mod­u­lar auto­ma­tion eco­sys­tem, built ex­pli­citly to sup­port con­tinu­ous in­nov­a­tion without dis­turb­ing core con­trol func­tions.

Cru­cially, Auto­ma­tion Ex­ten­ded builds on sys­tems that cus­tom­ers already trust, spe­cific­ally ABB Abil­ity™ Sys­tem 800xA®, ABB Abil­ity™ Sym­phony® Plus and ABB Freel­ance. Tried, tested and proven in mul­tiple ap­plic­a­tions across mul­tiple in­dus­tries, these plat­forms re­main the back­bone of plant op­er­a­tions, while new cap­ab­il­it­ies are in­tro­duced pro­gress­ively and safely around them.

Sep­ar­a­tion of con­cerns

At the heart of Auto­ma­tion Ex­ten­ded is a mod­ern mod­u­lar ar­chi­tec­ture, char­ac­ter­ized by the im­ple­ment­a­tion of sep­ar­a­tion of con­cerns prin­ciples in­to two dis­tinct but se­curely con­nec­ted en­vir­on­ments, each op­tim­ized for a dif­fer­ent pur­pose and op­er­at­ing as a co­hes­ive eco­sys­tem. 

The Con­trol En­vir­on­ment is where de­term­in­ist­ic, real-time pro­cess con­trol takes place. It re­mains ro­bust, li­fe­cycle-re­si­li­ent and cy­ber-se­cure, pri­or­it­iz­ing avail­ab­il­ity, safety and re­li­ab­il­ity. This en­vir­on­ment aligns closely with the tra­di­tion­al strengths of a DCS and con­tin­ues to handle the im­me­di­ate re­sponses re­quired for safe plant op­er­a­tion.

Sit­ting along­side it is the Di­git­al En­vir­on­ment. This en­vir­on­ment is es­sen­tially a flex­ible, mod­u­lar space where in­nov­a­tion hap­pens and where fea­tures and tools such as ad­vanced ana­lyt­ics, AI-driv­en ap­plic­a­tions, con­di­tion mon­it­or­ing, pre­dict­ive main­ten­ance, alarm man­age­ment and de­cision-sup­port tools can be de­ployed, up­dated or re­moved without af­fect­ing the core con­trol func­tions.

This sep­ar­a­tion is what sets Auto­ma­tion Ex­ten­ded apart from pre­vi­ous ap­proaches, by al­low­ing each en­vir­on­ment to evolve with­in its own li­fe­cycle, at its own pace, while re­main­ing se­curely in­ter­con­nec­ted. Li­fe­cycle Ser­vices are in­teg­ral to the auto­ma­tion eco­sys­tem, en­abling not only con­tinu­ous up­dates but also op­tim­iz­a­tions without dis­rupt­ing crit­ic­al op­er­a­tions. This cre­ates a trus­ted op­er­a­tion­al found­a­tion for cus­tom­ers, al­low­ing the auto­ma­tion eco­sys­tem to re­main in­nov­at­ive while safe­guard­ing in­stalled as­sets and en­sur­ing seam­less ad­apt­a­tion to fu­ture de­mands.

In­nov­a­tion with con­tinu­ity

For in­dus­tri­al op­er­at­ors, Auto­ma­tion Ex­ten­ded gives the abil­ity to ad­opt new di­git­al cap­ab­il­it­ies step by step that are aligned with their op­er­a­tion­al pri­or­it­ies, risk tol­er­ance and busi­ness strategy. Rather than large, one-time trans­form­a­tions, mod­ern­iz­a­tion can now be achieved in­cre­ment­ally, with en­hance­ments such as se­cur­ity patches, per­form­ance im­prove­ments and new ap­plic­a­tions ad­ded as and when ne­ces­sary, without the cost, dis­rup­tion and po­ten­tial er­rors of car­ry­ing out a full up­grade or re­place­ment. 

With op­er­at­ors fa­cing ever-press­ing pres­sures on costs, this ap­proach dir­ectly ad­dresses the need to max­im­ize the re­turn on ex­ist­ing auto­ma­tion in­vest­ments. With Auto­ma­tion Ex­ten­ded, the life and value of even dec­ades-old plants can now be ex­ten­ded and aug­men­ted through ac­cess to mod­ern tech­no­lo­gies such as AI, edge in­tel­li­gence and real-time ana­lyt­ics.

Auto­ma­tion Ex­ten­ded also helps cus­tom­ers man­age the grow­ing com­plex­ity of in­teg­rat­ing dif­fer­ent sys­tems from dif­fer­ent pro­viders. Open stand­ards such as OPC UA, to­geth­er with cloud-nat­ive tech­no­lo­gies and con­tain­er-based ar­chi­tec­tures, en­able in­ter­op­er­ab­il­ity across vendors, sys­tems and do­mains. By re­mov­ing is­sues such as com­pat­ib­il­ity and in­ter­op­er­ab­il­ity between dif­fer­ent com­mu­nic­a­tions pro­to­cols, for ex­ample, they make it easi­er to in­teg­rate new tools, con­nect IT and OT en­vir­on­ments, and scale solu­tions across sites or fleets.

Equally im­port­ant is cy­ber se­cur­ity. The clear sep­ar­a­tion between con­trol and di­git­al do­mains, com­bined with li­fe­cycle-driv­en ser­vices, helps or­gan­iz­a­tions stay com­pli­ant with evolving reg­u­la­tions while re­du­cing ex­pos­ure to cy­ber risk.

Em­power­ing a chan­ging work­force

With hu­mans still very much at the heart of in­dus­tri­al op­er­a­tions, there is a need to con­sider not only what new tech­no­logy can do, but also how it in­ter­acts with those who need to use it. 

As ex­per­i­enced per­son­nel re­tire and are re­placed by a new gen­er­a­tion of di­git­al-nat­ive en­gin­eers, there is a need to en­sure that their op­er­a­tion­al know­ledge is both pre­served and made as eas­ily ac­cess­ible as pos­sible. 

Auto­ma­tion Ex­ten­ded provides in­tu­it­ive, con­nec­ted and col­lab­or­at­ive tools that res­on­ate with mod­ern skill sets, while pre­serving the proven con­trol lo­gic and op­er­a­tion­al know­ledge em­bed­ded in ex­ist­ing sys­tems. Fea­tures such as ad­vanced visu­al­iz­a­tion, ana­lyt­ics and in­tel­li­gent de­cision-sup­port ap­plic­a­tions en­sure that hu­man ex­pert­ise is aug­men­ted, help­ing op­er­at­ors and en­gin­eers make bet­ter de­cisions faster.
Cru­cially, Auto­ma­tion Ex­ten­ded provides the found­a­tions for ac­com­mod­at­ing fu­ture changes. By an­ti­cip­at­ing fu­ture use cases, from pre­dict­ive main­ten­ance to ex­pand­ing autonom­ous op­er­a­tions, it cre­ates an en­vir­on­ment where skills can evolve along­side tech­no­logy, re­du­cing the im­pact of know­ledge gaps and sup­port­ing long-term op­er­a­tion­al re­si­li­ence.

En­abling sus­tain­ab­il­ity and per­form­ance at scale

Sus­tain­ab­il­ity and reg­u­lat­ory pres­sures on en­ergy, emis­sions and re­sources are in­creas­ingly re­shap­ing the pri­or­it­ies of in­dus­tri­al com­pan­ies. Meet­ing these pres­sures de­pends on bet­ter data, deep­er in­sight and tight­er in­teg­ra­tion between pro­cess and elec­tric­al sys­tems.

By ex­tend­ing the reach of con­trol sys­tems in­to data-driv­en op­tim­iz­a­tion, Auto­ma­tion Ex­ten­ded sup­ports these goals. En­hance­ments such as con­tinu­ous con­di­tion mon­it­or­ing, AI-as­sisted per­form­ance ana­lys­is and real-time en­ergy in­sights all en­able more ef­fi­cient op­er­a­tions without com­prom­ising safety or avail­ab­il­ity. Over time, these cap­ab­il­it­ies can help achieve the trans­ition to­ward lower-car­bon, more re­source-ef­fi­cient pro­duc­tion mod­els, while main­tain­ing the re­li­ab­il­ity that es­sen­tial in­fra­struc­ture de­mands.

A uni­fied li­fe­cycle ap­proach

An­oth­er de­fin­ing ele­ment of Auto­ma­tion Ex­ten­ded is ABB’s com­pre­hens­ive li­fe­cycle ser­vices. Man­aging con­trol and di­git­al en­vir­on­ments in­de­pend­ently re­quires a co­ordin­ated ap­proach to up­dates, main­ten­ance and op­tim­iz­a­tion. ABB’s li­fe­cycle ser­vices en­sure that sys­tems re­main se­cure, sup­por­ted and fu­ture-ready throughout their op­er­a­tion­al life.

This pro­act­ive, ser­vice-driv­en mod­el re­duces total cost of own­er­ship, im­proves sys­tem avail­ab­il­ity and as­sures cus­tom­ers that their auto­ma­tion en­vir­on­ment can ad­apt to fu­ture de­mands wheth­er driv­en by reg­u­la­tion, mar­ket shifts or tech­no­lo­gic­al change.

Un­lock­ing in­dustry’s full po­ten­tial – today and to­mor­row 

With Auto­ma­tion Ex­ten­ded, ABB is not ask­ing cus­tom­ers to aban­don the sys­tems that have served them well, but rather ex­tend­ing their value in­to the next era of in­dus­tri­al auto­ma­tion.

Auto­ma­tion Ex­ten­ded also re­flects a broad­er shift in how in­dus­tri­al auto­ma­tion is evolving. By ad­opt­ing emer­ging in­dustry con­cepts such as NAMUR Open Ar­chi­tec­ture, soft­ware and hard­ware de­coup­ling, and hy­per­auto­ma­tion,  ABB opens up new pos­sib­il­it­ies in in­dus­tri­al op­er­a­tions through great­er open­ness, mod­u­lar­ity, hu­man-cent­ric design and se­cure in­nov­a­tion.

Rather than lock­ing cus­tom­ers in­to ri­gid up­grade cycles, ABB is po­s­i­tion­ing auto­ma­tion as a con­tinu­ously evolving eco­sys­tem that bal­ances sta­bil­ity with agil­ity, and re­li­ab­il­ity with in­nov­a­tion. For in­dus­tries fa­cing an un­cer­tain fu­ture, this bal­ance will be in­valu­able, provid­ing the scalab­il­ity and ad­apt­ab­il­ity to meet fu­ture changes and chal­lenges.

Stefan Basen­ach 
He has worked at the Swiss group ABB for over 20 years and is cur­rently Seni­or Vice Pres­id­ent of Glob­al Pro­cess Auto­ma­tion Tech­no­logy. He is com­mit­ted to im­ple­ment­ing sus­tain­able prac­tices and played a key role in lead­ing the ABB Pro­cess Auto­ma­tion En­ergy Di­vi­sion in Ger­many in sup­port­ing the en­ergy in­dustry in its trans­ition to­wards a net zero eco­nomy.

He holds a Dip­lom In­genieur de­gree in Tech­nis­che Ky­ber­netik (Tech­nic­al Cy­ber­net­ics) from the Uni­versity of Stut­tgart, spe­cial­ising in con­trol meth­od­o­logy for tech­nic­al and non-tech­nic­al sys­tems with a fo­cus on bio­chem­ic­al en­gin­eer­ing.
 

The Trio Mo­tion MS I/O Sys­tem en­ables dir­ect in­teg­ra­tion of I/O slices with a Mo­tion-PLC con­trol­ler. Highly ef­fi­cient data trans­fer is achieved via Trio’s new MS-Bus in­ter­face, a loc­al com­mu­nic­a­tion pro­tocol for MS I/O slice con­nec­tion that provides high data through­put for re­spons­ive ma­chine con­trol. The MS I/O sys­tem can be tailored to the con­nectiv­ity re­quire­ments of the ma­chine, al­low­ing any com­bin­a­tion of di­git­al in­puts and out­puts, and ana­logue in­puts and out­puts.

I/O slices simply ‘click in’ via for­ward in­ser­tion, with fast and easy mount­ing to a DIN rail. Con­nec­tion is achieved via spring clamp con­nect­ors for a tool-free, se­cure in­stall­a­tion, com­bined with push but­ton wire re­mov­al, mak­ing slice in­ser­tion and swap­ping fast and easy to achieve. Slices are just 12mm wide, min­im­ising the foot­print in­side a cab­in­et or on­board a ma­chine.

Coupler for port ex­pan­sion

Up to 16 I/O slices can be dir­ectly in­teg­rated with a Mo­tion-PLC con­trol­ler, with ex­ten­sion achieved by adding one or more MS EC (Eth­er­CAT) couplers. Each MS EC coupler can in­teg­rate a fur­ther 16 I/O slices, and in total, a Mo­tion-PLC con­trol­ler can be ex­pan­ded to host 1024 di­git­al ports and 128 ana­logue ports.As well as ex­tend­ing I/O con­nectiv­ity, adding an MS EC coupler can also achieve a dis­trib­uted I/O sys­tem, keep­ing I/O close to the sensors to re­duce the cost and time of cabling. In­stead, just a single cable is re­quired to con­nect the MS EC coupler to a Mo­tion-PLC con­trol­ler.  Mul­tiple MS EC couplers can be con­nec­ted to a single Eth­er­CAT con­trol­ler, in­clud­ing third-party con­trol­lers, to cre­ate com­plete con­trol across a ma­chine.

Con­nec­tion to Eth­er­CAT

Slices click in to the MS EC coupler, com­mu­nic­at­ing with it via the MS-Bus in­ter­face, and the MS EC coupler acts as a high-speed bridge to the Eth­er­CAT net­work. With up­date rates down to just 125µs, this achieves high per­form­ance for both mo­tion con­trol and ma­chine con­trol auto­ma­tion. With Eth­er­CAT IN and OUT ports, the MS EC coupler can also be placed at any point across the Eth­er­CAT net­work.

The Mo­tion-PLC con­trol­ler I/O slice in­ter­face and the MS EC I/O coupler are syn­chron­ized to Trio’s Mo­tion-iX mo­tion en­gine, en­abling de­term­in­ist­ic be­ha­viour across all mo­tion and ma­chine con­nec­tions. This en­sures high-speed, re­li­able con­trol to op­tim­ise con­trol co­ordin­a­tion. I/O in­teg­ra­tion and man­age­ment is achieved through Trio’s easy to use Mo­tion­Per­fect soft­ware for mo­tion and ma­chine set up.

The new I/O sys­tem is launched along­side Trio’s new Mo­tion-PLC range that provides ad­vanced mo­tion con­trol per­form­ance with the func­tion­al­ity and sim­pli­city of a PLC. The new class of con­trol­ler com­bines high-per­form­ance mo­tion con­trol over Eth­er­CAT plus lo­gic and I/O ex­pan­sion, en­abling faster, sim­pler ma­chine de­vel­op­ment. The first con­trol­lers in the range are now avail­able to or­der and scale ma­chine and mo­tion re­quire­ments up to eight axes.
 

Code­Mas­ter is an In­dustry 4.0 ap­plic­a­tion plat­form de­veloped by MCS Group. It provides real-time trace­ab­il­ity and sus­tain­ab­il­ity re­ports, of­fer­ing tan­gible ad­vant­ages and gains. In line with the In­dustry 4.0 concept, it builds a bridge between the pro­duc­tion site and man­age­ment. The plat­form of­fers sec­tor-spe­cif­ic solu­tions without dis­crim­in­at­ing between sec­tors, es­pe­cially with re­gard to en­ergy, main­ten­ance and pro­duc­tion out­puts.

Pro­duc­tion mon­it­or­ing

Pro­duc­tion op­er­a­tions can be mon­itored in real time, with op­er­at­ors able to fol­low all op­er­a­tions on kiosks at the plant. Code­Mas­ter max­im­ises the use of main­ten­ance cap­ab­il­it­ies and in­creases ma­chine util­isa­tion. It re­duces down­time of ma­chines in op­er­a­tion.

En­ergy mon­it­or­ing

Code­Mas­ter en­ables real-time trace­ab­il­ity to mon­it­or en­ergy con­sump­tion in op­er­a­tion. En­ergy can be mon­itored on a ma­chine or pro­duc­tion basis and cal­cu­late the total spent en­ergy on a daily, weekly and monthly basis.

The smart con­trol mode saves en­ergy by mo­ment­ar­ily stop­ping non-es­sen­tial pro­cesses, while en­sur­ing pro­duc­tion trace­ab­il­ity throughout the pro­cess. Mon­et­ary gains from daily and All-time en­ergy sav­ings are dis­played on the screen.

Car­bon emis­sions are cal­cu­lated from the elec­tri­city and gas con­sump­tion dur­ing pro­duc­tion and the Car­bon Foot­print is in­stantly dis­played. This data can be in­teg­rated with ERP.
Code­Mas­ter of­fers solu­tions with Op­er­at­or Track­ing con­trol for ac­cess­ing to ma­chines and plants with max­im­um ef­fi­ciency and pro­cess se­cur­ity. Op­er­at­or can define the down­times and send break­down no­ti­fic­a­tion to main­ten­ance by RFID cards.

Re­port­ing

Pro­duc­tion re­ports based on ma­chines can be ob­tained from the Code­Mas­ter plat­form. En­ergy and main­ten­ance re­ports can also be ad­ded as op­tion­al ex­tras. All in­form­a­tion re­ceived in re­port form can be con­ver­ted in­to file formats such as xls and pdf.

Code­Mas­ter sets the stand­ard for meas­ur­ing pro­duc­tion ef­fi­ciency and provides OEE track­ing to en­sure con­sist­ent im­ple­ment­a­tion of this stand­ard. It re­duces per­form­ance losses in the pro­duc­tion pro­cess, min­im­ises down­time and us­ab­il­ity losses, and im­proves pro­duc­tion ef­fi­ciency by an av­er­age of 20% with ef­fect­ive qual­ity mon­it­or­ing.
 

The JUMO diraT­RON DR100 DIN rail con­trol­ler is an im­port­ant tool for pro­cess con­trol. The device can be ad­ap­ted to dif­fer­ent pro­cess re­quire­ments with con­fig­ur­able meas­ure­ment in­puts and con­trol op­tions as a two-point, three-point, mod­u­lat­ing, or con­tinu­ous con­trol­ler. An ana­log out­put for con­trol­ler, ac­tu­al value, or set­point out­put as well as 2 di­git­al con­trol sig­nals for such uses as im­ple­ment­ing simple lo­gic func­tions or delayed switch­ing on and off en­sure a wide range of ap­plic­a­tion pos­sib­il­it­ies. The in­teg­rated RS485 in­ter­face en­ables seam­less com­mu­nic­a­tion with oth­er sys­tems and en­sures easy in­teg­ra­tion in­to ex­ist­ing net­works.

Rear pan­el bus for re­duced cabling

All rel­ev­ant in­form­a­tion is dis­played clearly and con­cisely on the text dis­play. The rear pan­el bus en­ables quick and easy in­stall­a­tion of up to 10 devices while at the same time re­du­cing the amount of cabling re­quired. The JUMO diraT­RON DR100 is a ver­sat­ile and user-friendly device that is at­tract­ive to a wide range of in­dus­tries and ap­plic­a­tions. A key ad­vant­age is its easy in­teg­ra­tion in­to ex­ist­ing JUMO and third-party sys­tems.
 

Beck­hoff’s C60xx scal­able series of ul­tra-com­pact in­dus­tri­al PCs com­bines high com­put­ing power in an ex­tremely com­pact format with a wide range of op­tions for in­stall­a­tion in the con­trol cab­in­et. A new In­tel Atom® pro­cessor gen­er­a­tion now provides even more per­form­ance re­serves in the devices, which cov­er the spec­trum from low to high auto­ma­tion re­quire­ments.

Fan­less design for com­plex auto­ma­tion tasks

With a new gen­er­a­tion of pro­cessors, the C6015, C6017, and C6025 ul­tra-com­pact In­dus­tri­al PCs can be used for even more de­mand­ing com­put­ing tasks than be­fore, while re­tain­ing their com­pact form factor. The fan­less devices are de­signed in par­tic­u­lar for con­trol, visu­al­iz­a­tion, and com­mu­nic­a­tion – from com­plex auto­ma­tion and vir­tu­al­iz­a­tion to use as an edge device or HMI plat­form. All of this be­ne­fits from the new In­tel Atom® x7 CPU series, which of­fers up to eight pro­cessor cores and a 3.0 GHz clock fre­quency.

As the smal­lest device with di­men­sions of just 82 x 82 x 40 mm, the C6015 ul­tra-com­pact In­dus­tri­al PC is ideal for highly com­pact ap­plic­a­tions, vir­tu­al­iz­a­tion, and IoT. The same ap­plies to the C6017 with an in­stall­a­tion depth of 66 mm, which has an ad­di­tion­al second board level for op­tion­al in­ter­faces and in­teg­rated 1-second UPS. Meas­ur­ing 82 x 127 x 47 mm, the C6025 can also be ex­pan­ded to up to eight pro­cessor cores and used with high-per­form­ance SSDs and USB-C.
 

For the cof­fee shop, the task is to draw the ex­act dose of wa­ter re­quired to pro­duce the full rich­ness of a per­fect cup of es­presso. For the pub or bier­keller, it is serving ex­actly a half-liter of weiss­bi­er so that the cus­tom­er gets no more and no less than they paid for. And for the in­dus­tri­al pro­cess con­trol en­gin­eer, the re­quire­ment is to know ex­actly when a fil­ter has cleaned its rated volume of wa­ter and is due for re­place­ment. 

In all these ap­plic­a­tions, ac­cur­ate flow sens­ing can sub­stan­tially in­crease the value of equip­ment or ma­chinery. Tra­di­tion­al elec­tromech­an­ic­al tech­no­logy for flow sens­ing has, however, been a pain point for sys­tem design en­gin­eers, caus­ing per­form­ance and re­li­ab­il­ity head­aches which have proved dif­fi­cult to erad­ic­ate. 

Pure elec­tron­ic sens­ing us­ing ul­tra­son­ic tech­no­logy elim­in­ates the mov­ing parts from a flow sensor as­sembly, and provides an es­cape route from the prob­lems with tra­di­tion­al flow sensors. When first in­tro­duced, ul­tra­son­ic sensor ICs posed a con­sid­er­able in­teg­ra­tion chal­lenge which gen­er­ally re­stric­ted their use to the man­u­fac­tur­ers of spe­cial­ist meas­ure­ment equip­ment. 

But now suc­cess­ive gen­er­a­tions of com­plete off-the-shelf ul­tra­son­ic flow sens­ing mod­ules, which provide a simple meas­ure­ment in­ter­face to any mi­cro­con­trol­ler, have made ac­cur­ate, re­li­able ul­tra­son­ic flow sens­ing a val­id op­tion for non-spe­cial­ist de­sign­ers of any type of equip­ment which can be­ne­fit from flow rate meas­ure­ment. 

Stuck with tra­di­tion­al tur­bine-based flow sensors

Tra­di­tion­ally, flow sens­ing has been per­formed us­ing a simple elec­tromech­an­ic­al as­sembly com­pris­ing a length of tubing con­tain­ing tur­bines, which is po­si­tioned in­line with the flow (see Fig­ure 1). The speed at which the tur­bines ro­tate can be con­ver­ted in­to a meas­ure­ment of the flow rate. Over time, these meas­ure­ments can be in­teg­rated to provide an ab­so­lute meas­ure­ment of the volume of li­quid that has passed through the sensor. 

This meth­od of sens­ing flow provides a simple meas­ure­ment in­ter­face to an ex­tern­al lo­gic device such as a mi­cro­con­trol­ler or pro­gram­mable lo­gic con­trol­ler (PLC). But equip­ment man­u­fac­tur­ers have to take ac­count of ser­i­ous draw­backs which can lim­it the sensor’s use­ful­ness, or even make the sensor in­op­er­able. The prob­lems stem from in­her­ent mech­an­ic­al char­ac­ter­ist­ics of the tur­bine or wheel in the as­sembly.

The first prob­lem is that a tur­bine has fric­tion which cre­ates in­er­tia: at low flow rates, the force of the flow will be in­suf­fi­cient to over­come the tur­bine’s in­er­tia, and so the tur­bine will fail to ro­tate. As a res­ult, a low flow rate will be re­gistered as zero flow. Part of the value of many ap­plic­a­tions for flow sens­ing is the abil­ity to meas­ure leak­age – in oth­er words, a fault con­di­tion in which the flow is con­tinu­ous, but at a much lower rate than in nor­mal op­er­a­tion. In this case, an elec­tromech­an­ic­al flow sensor will be able to meas­ure nor­mal flow, but will likely fail to alert the op­er­at­or to leak­age. 

The second prob­lem with tur­bines is cata­stroph­ic fail­ure: the tur­bine is a mov­ing part, and so can be­come cor­roded or broken. Re­li­ab­il­ity is a key is­sue for users of flow sensors: mech­an­ic­al flow sensors suf­fer from wear and tear which lim­it their op­er­at­ing lifespan.

Ul­tra­son­ic flow sens­ing tech­no­logy elim­in­ates mov­ing parts

If the prob­lem is the pres­ence of a mech­an­ic­al com­pon­ent in the flow to be meas­ured, then the solu­tion is to meas­ure flow con­tact­lessly. This can be ac­com­plished by ul­tra­son­ic sens­ing tech­no­logy. 

Ul­tra­son­ic flow sensors meas­ure flu­id flow rate by trans­mit­ting sound waves through the flow­ing me­di­um via paired trans­ducers po­si­tioned di­ag­on­ally across the pipe. One trans­ducer sends ul­tra­son­ic pulses down­stream while the oth­er sends them up­stream. The flow­ing flu­id af­fects propaga­tion speed: down­stream pulses travel faster (aided by the flow) while up­stream pulses travel more slowly (im­peded by the flow). Flow ve­lo­city is dir­ectly pro­por­tion­al to the dif­fer­ence in trans­it times between these paths. 

This non-in­trus­ive meas­ure­ment tech­nique works with clean li­quids and gases, has no ef­fect on the flow me­di­um it­self, and scales across vari­ous pipe dia­met­ers. Cru­cially, it also elim­in­ates the draw­backs of tur­bine-based mech­an­ic­al flow sensors. The ab­sence of mov­ing parts in­side the flow me­di­um means that the sensor of­fers a prac­tic­ally un­lim­ited op­er­at­ing lifespan, and can also meas­ure ex­tremely slow flow speeds. 

Im­ple­ment­a­tion of this meth­od of flow sens­ing calls for ex­tremely ac­cur­ate meas­ure­ment of the small-time dif­fer­ences between down­stream and up­stream sound trans­mis­sion – a phe­nomen­on meas­ured in pi­co­seconds. 

In fact, the en­tire time sig­nal-pro­cessing func­tion may be im­ple­men­ted by an ul­tra­son­ic flow con­vert­er IC from Sci­o­Sense. This highly in­teg­rated device, shown as the ‘UFC’ block in Fig­ure 2, trig­gers the twin trans­ducers, meas­ures the time dif­fer­ence between the re­turn sig­nals, and con­verts the meas­ure­ments to a flow rate and ac­cu­mu­lated volume data for any giv­en pipe dia­met­er. 

Key design con­sid­er­a­tions in ul­tra­son­ic flow meter­ing

To in­teg­rate an ul­tra­son­ic flow con­vert­er (UFC) in­to a flow sensor sys­tem, the de­sign­er has to take ac­count of vari­ous con­sid­er­a­tions which af­fect the op­er­a­tion of the tech­no­logy. These in­clude: 

• The trans­ducer mount­ing geo­metry.
• The acous­tic prop­er­ties of the pipe ma­ter­i­al - metals, plastics, and com­pos­ite pipes each have dif­fer­ent acous­tic im­ped­ances and at­ten­u­ation char­ac­ter­ist­ics. Wall thick­ness, sur­face fin­ish, and coat­ings can re­flect or ab­sorb acous­tic en­ergy. The acous­tic path must also ac­count for re­frac­tion at ma­ter­i­al bound­ar­ies. 
• Tem­per­at­ure vari­ation - sound ve­lo­city in flu­ids var­ies sig­ni­fic­antly with tem­per­at­ure. For in­stance, the speed of sound in wa­ter var­ies by ap­prox­im­ately 0.6%/°C.
   

Off-the-shelf mod­ules provide ready-made solu­tion 

Spe­cial­ists in flow meas­ure­ment sys­tem in­teg­ra­tion, such as wa­ter util­ity meter man­u­fac­tur­ers, main­tain in­tern­al design ex­pert­ise to en­able the in­teg­ra­tion of a UFC in­to a cus­tom flow sensor as­sembly, tak­ing ac­count of the factors lis­ted above. 

But the wider ap­plic­a­tion of flow sens­ing has value in a broad range of oth­er types of equip­ment. Ex­amples in­clude: 

• Cof­fee brew­ing ma­chines,
• Bever­age dis­pensers,
• Wa­ter pur­i­fi­ers,
• Wa­ter heat­ers, boil­ers and heat pumps,
• Ir­rig­a­tion sys­tems,
• Cool­ing ma­chines,
• In­dus­tri­al pro­cess con­trol sys­tems and fil­ters,
• Live­stock feed­ing equip­ment.
   

In these ap­plic­a­tions, flow sens­ing is a peri­pher­al rather than a primary func­tion, and so here OEMs typ­ic­ally prefer a ready-made, off-the-shelf ul­tra­son­ic flow sens­ing solu­tion which dra­mat­ic­ally re­duces design time and ef­fort and ac­cel­er­ates time to mar­ket. 

Com­plete ul­tra­son­ic flow sensor mod­ules meet this mar­ket need. Sci­o­Sense is a pi­on­eer in this mar­ket, of­fer­ing first the UFM-01 and, in 2025, launched an im­proved ver­sion, the UFM-02. The ad­vant­age of a mod­u­lar solu­tion is that it is ex­tremely easy to in­teg­rate in­to end equip­ment designs. In the case of the UFM-02, for in­stance, the mod­ule is avail­able in two thread sizes: 0.5” and 1”, each provided in either a BSPP (Brit­ish Stand­ard Pipe Par­al­lel) or NPS (Amer­ic­an Na­tion­al Pipe Straight) format. Two more thread sizes, 3/8” and1.5”, will be avail­able soon. The smal­lest thread size man­ages a max­im­um flow rate of 20l per minute, and the largest, up to 450l per minute. 

he mod­ule is highly sens­it­ive to slow li­quid flows, al­low­ing the sensor to ac­cur­ately de­tect leak­age. In its smal­lest, 3/8” thread size, the UFM-02 can meas­ure flows as slow as 0.03l per minute. 

The UFM-02 is also easy to in­ter­face to any mi­cro­con­trol­ler or PLC. The mod­ule is avail­able with a choice of two cable con­nec­tions. A four-wire pulse in­ter­face cable provides a simple out­put sig­nal with up to 450 pulses per liter and a 10-wire SPI cable which provides di­git­al data in­clud­ing total volume of li­quid flow in cu­bic meters, filtered flow rate in liters/hour, and a meas­ure­ment of the li­quid’s tem­per­at­ure.

An im­port­ant de­vel­op­ment in the second-gen­er­a­tion UFM-02 mod­ule is its power con­sump­tion, which is sub­stan­tially lower than in the UFM-01. Av­er­age op­er­at­ing cur­rent has been re­duced to 50µA, low enough to en­able ap­plic­a­tions to run for years on a stand­ard primary bat­tery.

The in­tro­duc­tion of this latest mod­ule means that a drop-in solu­tion for ul­tra­son­ic flow sens­ing can now be im­ple­men­ted in ap­plic­a­tions which can­not eas­ily be con­nec­ted to a mains or oth­er ex­tern­al power sup­ply and so rely on bat­tery power. 

Mod­ule man­u­fac­turer with a long her­it­age in ul­tra­son­ic flow sens­ing

Ul­tra­son­ic flow sens­ing provides a re­li­able, ac­cur­ate and sens­it­ive al­tern­at­ive to tra­di­tion­al mech­an­ic­al flow sens­ing. By us­ing a mod­u­lar off-the-shelf sens­ing as­sembly, OEMs can take ad­vant­age of these qual­it­ies of ul­tra­son­ic tech­no­logy in a solu­tion which is easy to in­teg­rate in­to an elec­tron­ics sys­tem. 

De­sign­ers who eval­u­ate the latest UFM-02 mod­ule can also take con­fid­ence from the long her­it­age of Sci­o­Sense, a com­pany which in­tro­duced its first ul­tra­son­ic flow con­vert­er IC more than 25 years ago, and which can of­fer cus­tom­ers deep ex­pert­ise in every as­pect of the im­ple­ment­a­tion of ul­tra­son­ic tech­no­logy for flow meas­ure­ment. 
 

This class of ma­chines are de­signed to do more than auto­mate. They're built to move like us. They're built to work along­side us. And at times, they're even built to stand in for us.
Yet rep­lic­at­ing hu­man mo­tion is not just a ques­tion of soft­ware and AI. It starts at the core com­pon­ents that en­able this move­ment, with ac­tu­at­ors and mo­tors that com­bine com­pact size, light­weight design, and re­mark­able per­form­ance.

That’s where Portes­cap comes in. As part of the Regal Rexnord fam­ily of brands, Portes­cap brings dec­ades of ex­per­i­ence in mini­ature mo­tion sys­tems and a proven track re­cord in high-per­form­ance med­ic­al and in­dus­tri­al ap­plic­a­tions. Today, it is sup­port­ing a new wave of ro­bot­ics OEMs as they trans­ition from pro­to­type to pro­duc­tion.

The rise of hu­manoid ro­bot­ics

The idea of a hu­manoid ma­chine has fas­cin­ated en­gin­eers, sci­ent­ists, and storytellers for over a cen­tury, ap­pear­ing in lit­er­at­ure and early cine­mat­ic vis­ions of the fu­ture long be­fore the tech­no­logy ex­is­ted to make them real. Early at­tempts at hu­manoid ro­bots in the mid-to-late 20th cen­tury were largely ex­per­i­ment­al, of­ten lim­ited to slow, ri­gid move­ments and ba­sic pro­grammed routines.

Since the turn of the mil­len­ni­um, however, a com­bin­a­tion of break­throughs in AI, com­put­ing, mo­tion con­trol, and ma­ter­i­als sci­ence has brought the concept with­in reach. Today, hu­manoid ro­bots are be­ing de­veloped with in­creas­ingly soph­ist­ic­ated cap­ab­il­it­ies: they can walk, bal­ance, ma­nip­u­late ob­jects, and re­spond to voice com­mands or sens­ory feed­back.
The pur­pose of this form factor is not simply to mim­ic the hu­man body for its own sake. It al­lows these ro­bots to in­ter­act with hu­man en­vir­on­ments, de­signed around our size, tools, and work­flows, without need­ing ex­tens­ive changes to in­fra­struc­ture. That makes them well-suited to work­ing along­side people, wheth­er on pro­duc­tion lines, in ware­houses, in health­care set­tings, or in the field.

Pre­par­ing for harsh en­vir­on­ments

Many of today’s ro­bot­ics ap­plic­a­tions are destined for highly con­trolled en­vir­on­ments like ware­houses or hos­pit­als. However, as the tech­no­logy ma­tures and its cap­ab­il­it­ies grow, there's a very good chance that to­mor­row’s sys­tems may need to walk the ocean floor, enter ra­dio­act­ive zones, or carry out main­ten­ance in the va­cu­um of space.

In many of these en­vir­on­ments, hu­man work­ers would face un­ac­cept­able risks from heat, pres­sure, ra­di­ation, or isol­a­tion. Hu­manoid ro­bots and exo­skel­et­ons of­fer a way to ex­tend hu­man cap­ab­il­ity in­to these haz­ard­ous zones, per­form­ing tasks re­motely, re­li­ably, and – vi­tally – without ex­pos­ing hu­man op­er­at­ors to danger.

These scen­ari­os de­mand more than smart AI; they re­quire mech­an­ic­al sys­tems en­gin­eered to en­dure the ex­tremes. Portes­cap is already well-pre­pared for these scen­ari­os, however, as it has ex­tens­ive ex­per­i­ence in build­ing mo­tors for ex­treme con­di­tions, such as high heat, chem­ic­al ex­pos­ure, vi­bra­tion, and more.

While many ro­bot­ic ap­plic­a­tions are still pre-com­mer­cial, Portes­cap is already de­vel­op­ing solu­tions that can handle these tough op­er­at­ing con­di­tions. With seal­ing, in­su­la­tion, and spe­cial­ised ma­ter­i­als, the com­pany is ready to sup­port OEMs as their ap­plic­a­tions move off the lab bench and in­to the field. 

Mak­ing hands work

One of the key re­quire­ments of any hu­manoid ro­bot is the abil­ity to in­ter­act with its en­vir­on­ment in the same way a hu­man would. As such, it's vi­tal that they have func­tion­al hands.
Achiev­ing this, however, is not ne­ces­sar­ily a simple task.

Al­though we of­ten take it for gran­ted, the hu­man hand is a mar­vel of en­gin­eer­ing, one that is cap­able of del­ic­ate ma­nip­u­la­tion, strong grip, and com­plex mo­tion, all in a com­pact, ad­apt­able form. This means that any ro­bot­ic rep­lica must be small enough to fit in­side hu­man-like form factors, strong enough to grip and lift weight, and smart enough to know just how much of that strength to use.

To meet this chal­lenge, Portes­cap of­fers a wide port­fo­lio of mo­tor to­po­lo­gies and tech­no­lo­gies. Cyl­indric­al mo­tors, shaped like slim bat­ter­ies, can be em­bed­ded in fin­gers or palm area. Flat mo­tors, mean­ing with short axi­al dis­tance, of­fer high torque in com­pact pack­ages for wrists or arm in­teg­ra­tion. Cru­cially, the com­pany also provides brushed DC, hy­brid step­per, and brush­less DC op­tions (in­clud­ing both slot­ted and slot­less designs), help­ing de­velopers strike the right bal­ance of speed, torque, smooth­ness, and ef­fi­ciency for each ax­is of mo­tion.
But com­pon­ents alone don’t make a sys­tem. What sets Portes­cap apart is its "en­gin­eer-to-en­gin­eer" ap­proach. The com­pany works dir­ectly with ro­boti­cists, guid­ing design teams through mo­tor se­lec­tion, in­teg­ra­tion with gear­heads and en­coders, and per­form­ance op­tim­isa­tion to achieve spe­cif­ic mo­tion goals. Wheth­er an OEM needs fast, high-volume grip­ping or smooth, multi-ar­tic­u­lated ges­tures, Portes­cap can con­fig­ure a solu­tion that fits the form and de­liv­ers the func­tion.

Bring­ing bion­ics to life

Hu­manoid ro­bots are not the only ap­plic­a­tion for this kind of solu­tion, however. Per­haps the most im­me­di­ate and trans­form­at­ive im­pact of ro­bot­ic hand de­vel­op­ment in­stead lies in pros­thet­ics.

Portes­cap’s tech­no­logy is already power­ing a new gen­er­a­tion of bion­ic limbs that com­bine func­tion­al grip with in­tu­it­ive con­trol. These solu­tions go bey­ond raw mo­tor specs, draw­ing on a deep un­der­stand­ing of cost, weight, and pa­tient er­go­nom­ics.

Pros­thet­ic de­velopers of­ten tar­get around 80% of hu­man hand dex­ter­ity, with 10-20 ba­sic mo­tion pat­terns. These designs must be light­weight, dur­able, and ef­fi­cient, while re­main­ing af­ford­able for cost-sens­it­ive mar­kets. Portes­cap’s ex­per­i­ence in both premi­um and value-en­gin­eered designs makes it well suited to this space.

From proof-of-concept to scaled pro­duc­tion

Across the in­dustry, OEMs are ra­cing to prove the value of next-gen­er­a­tion ro­bot­ics. Demon­strat­or units and pi­lot projects are be­ing used to un­lock fund­ing, at­tract stra­tegic part­ners, and se­cure long-term mar­ket po­s­i­tions. That means mo­tion sys­tem part­ners must be able to de­liv­er quickly, re­li­ably, and flex­ibly.

Portes­cap sup­ports this full jour­ney. The com­pany can provide small quant­it­ies for R&D test­ing and val­id­a­tion, then take ad­vant­age of Regal Rexnord's glob­al reach and en­gin­eer­ing ex­pert­ise to scale seam­lessly to sup­port com­mer­cial launches, with lead times and pro­duc­tion in­fra­struc­ture already proven in de­mand­ing sec­tors like med­ic­al devices and aerospace. This makes it not just a com­pon­ent pro­vider, but a long-term plat­form part­ner.

This scalab­il­ity also en­ables cost-ef­fect­ive it­er­a­tion. Cus­tom­ers can test sev­er­al con­fig­ur­a­tions or gear ra­tios in par­al­lel, then down-se­lect based on ac­tu­al test data. Portes­cap’s glob­al sup­port net­work helps man­age this pro­cess ef­fi­ciently, re­du­cing de­vel­op­ment risk and time to mar­ket.

Part­ner for the Next Gen­er­a­tion

As ro­bot­ics moves to­ward real-world de­ploy­ment, suc­cess will come down to more than in­nov­a­tion. It will re­quire mo­tion solu­tions that are en­gin­eered pre­cisely, de­livered re­li­ably, and scaled ef­fect­ively.

From form-fit op­tions and tech­nic­al ex­pert­ise to pro­duc­tion agil­ity and ap­plic­a­tion sup­port, Portes­cap of­fers everything OEMs need to bring hu­manoids and exo­skel­et­ons to life. In a field where form fol­lows func­tion, the com­pany is ready to power what’s next. And as part of Regal Rexnord, it does so with the strength and sup­port of a glob­al or­gan­isa­tion, com­bin­ing loc­al ex­pert­ise with world­wide reach to help OEMs turn ideas in­to fully real­ised, mar­ket-ready solu­tions.
 

Apex Dy­nam­ics has launched its ac­cur­ate, com­pact and power­ful range of PFII plan­et­ary gear­boxes. De­signed for use in shaft-driv­en ac­tu­at­ors, lin­ear units and ma­chine axes, the PFII Series de­liv­ers high torque, low noise and pre­ci­sion. With an ex­tremely com­pact and ef­fi­cient design, PFII gear­boxes fea­ture an in­nov­at­ive coaxi­al con­fig­ur­a­tion us­ing a hol­low in­put and out­put shaft. This means the out­put shaft is in line with the mo­tor shaft, com­bin­ing ex­cel­lent per­form­ance with smart design.

PFII gear­boxes fea­ture hardened plan­et­ary gears, com­bin­ing high torque and pre­cise op­er­a­tion with low noise and high speed. In ad­di­tion, the ad­apter hous­ings are made from light­weight alu­mini­um to re­duce weight without com­prom­ising per­form­ance or re­li­ab­il­ity, and in­tern­al gear­ing is made from al­loy steel to sup­port both high torque and ri­gid­ity.  

Ad­vanced clamp­ing ring 

The PFII comes in three frame sizes, with a wide range of gear ra­tios from 3:1 to 1000:1, of­fer­ing high flex­ib­il­ity. It provides high per­form­ance with a rated torque up to 232 Nm and high ac­cur­acy, with back­lash down to six arc minutes. One of the key fea­tures of the PFII range is the way in which the out­put shaft is clamped. A ra­di­al clamp­ing ring is used for both in­put and out­put shafts, with the clamp­ing ring on the out­put side equipped with two ra­di­al bolts to handle high­er torque. This of­fers sig­ni­fic­ant be­ne­fits over tra­di­tion­al sys­tems, provid­ing easy as­sembly and main­ten­ance, and com­pact design as well as high­er tol­er­ance, ro­bust­ness and great­er suit­ab­il­ity for dy­nam­ic ap­plic­a­tions.

The PFII en­ables shaft-to-shaft power trans­mis­sion con­nec­tion between two ro­tat­ing shafts and ver­sat­ile mount­ing spe­cif­ic to the mo­tor. Cus­tom­ized ad­apters are avail­able for shaft ac­tu­at­ors, while Apex Dy­nam­ics can also sup­ply coup­lings where they are re­quired.

With the new In­dus­tri­al POWER­ISE IPR40, Sta­bilus in­tro­duces cus­tom-made elec­tromech­an­ic­al drives for in­dus­tri­al ap­plic­a­tions. The "Cus­tom­ized to Or­der" op­tion al­lows cli­ents to con­fig­ure ac­tu­at­ors pre­cisely to their spe­cif­ic design, start­ing from or­der­ing amounts of one ac­tu­at­or to any de­sired num­ber.

Cus­tom­er spe­cif­ic or­ders

De­sign­ers who do not find what they need in Sta­bilus' stand­ard ac­tu­at­or range can now re­quest a cus­tom­ized solu­tion with short man­u­fac­tur­ing and de­liv­ery times. De­pend­ing on the ap­plic­a­tion, en­gin­eers com­ing from Sta­bilus or from its ex­pert brands ACE Stoßdämpfer GmbH or HAHN Gasfed­ern GmbH will sup­port cus­tom­ers from the design phase to com­mis­sion­ing.

The slim, com­pact IPR40 elec­tromech­an­ic­al spindle drives can be pre­cisely cus­tom­ized to cus­tom­er spe­cific­a­tions in terms of con­nec­tions, out­put forces, stroke lengths and speeds. They re­quire little in­stall­a­tion space and are avail­able with either 12 V or 24 V power sup­ply and in a wa­ter­proof IP67 ver­sion. Fur­ther­more, IPR40 can be ideally com­bined with in­dus­tri­al gas springs from the Sta­bilus Group when designs re­quire move­ment and con­trol of lar­ger masses. The ser­vices ac­com­pa­ny­ing these cus­tom­ized drive in­nov­a­tions in­clude design, con­fig­ur­a­tion, and com­mis­sion­ing, on-site if de­sired, in­clud­ing all set­tings and para­met­er­iz­a­tion of the elec­tron­ic con­trol units (ECUs).

Fol­low­ing this most re­cent mar­ket launch of IPR40 type ac­tu­at­ors, Sta­bilus will ex­tend the Cus­tom­ized to Or­der op­tion to its en­tire fam­ily of elec­tromech­an­ic­al drives, en­com­passing the IPR35, IPR35 SMART, and IPR40 SMART mod­els.
 

Elec­tric mo­tor man­u­fac­turer GA­MAK de­liv­ers high-per­form­ance solu­tions de­signed to meet the most de­mand­ing in­dus­tri­al ap­plic­a­tions. The GA­MAK Com­pressor Mo­tors set a trus­ted bench­mark for per­form­ance-crit­ic­al com­pressor sys­tems. The series of high-per­form­ance in­duc­tion mo­tors are spe­cific­ally en­gin­eered for de­mand­ing com­pressor ap­plic­a­tions. The series cov­ers power rat­ings from 5.5 to 250 kW and is avail­able in IE3 and IE4 ef­fi­ciency classes for op­tim­ized en­ergy use. 

VFD-ready con­struc­tion with re­in­forced in­su­la­tion

De­signed for vari­able and con­tinu­ous load op­er­a­tion, the mo­tors fea­ture a ser­vice factor of 1.15 or high­er and en­hanced start­ing torque char­ac­ter­ist­ics, en­abling re­li­able star­tup and safe hand­ling of tem­por­ary over­loads caused by high start­ing torque, pres­sure fluc­tu­ations, and ab­nor­mal op­er­at­ing con­di­tions. The ser­vice factor acts as a built-in safety mar­gin, ex­tend­ing main­ten­ance in­ter­vals, re­du­cing fail­ure risk, and en­sur­ing stable op­er­a­tion­al con­tinu­ity. VFD-ready con­struc­tion with re­in­forced in­su­la­tion ac­cord­ing to IEC 60034-18-41 en­sures re­li­able op­er­a­tion un­der high dv/dt and PWM stress. High-power ver­sions are equipped with in­su­lated bear­ings to pre­vent bear­ing cur­rents. H-class in­su­la­tion with PTC thermal pro­tec­tion, IP55 en­clos­ure, and TE­FC cool­ing provide dur­ab­il­ity, low main­ten­ance, and long ser­vice life for com­pressors, re­fri­ger­a­tion sys­tems, pumps, and fans.
 

Koll­mor­gen re­leased the next up­date for the Safe­Mo­tion™ Mon­it­or (SMM) firm­ware: SMM 3.0. This up­grade ex­pands func­tion­al safety sup­port for lin­ear mo­tors and lin­ear axes, help­ing ma­chine build­ers im­ple­ment func­tion­al safety in ap­plic­a­tions ran­ging from semi­con­duct­or man­u­fac­tur­ing to bat­tery pro­duc­tion and in­dus­tri­al auto­ma­tion that re­quire safety.

In­teg­rated in­to AKD2G servo drives and the Koll­mor­gen 2G Mo­tion Sys­tem, SMM 3.0 con­tin­ues to work with all mo­tors that fea­ture any HIPER­FACE DSL® rotary-safe feed­back sys­tem. It also al­lows the AKD2G drive to now sup­port EnD­at 2.2 safe feed­back sys­tems to bet­ter serve the grow­ing de­mand for high-per­form­ance safety solu­tions in pre­ci­sion mo­tion con­trol.

Per­form­ance and safety up to SIL 3 level

The EnD­at 2.2 safe pro­tocol, now sup­por­ted by ADK2G drives and 2G Mo­tion Sys­tem, de­liv­ers dual in­de­pend­ent po­s­i­tion­ing for ro­bust er­ror de­tec­tion, high-speed seri­al data trans­mis­sion for fast cycle times, in­teg­rated dia­gnostics with com­pre­hens­ive mon­it­or­ing, and flex­ible en­coder sup­port for in­cre­ment­al and ab­so­lute feed­back drives. 

Koll­mor­gen’s AKM2G and AKMA servo mo­tors also in­clude an EnD­at 2.2 safe feed­back op­tion, of­fer­ing even high­er per­form­ance and ac­cur­acy than HIPER­FACE DSL for axes where func­tion­al safety is re­quired. When com­bined, ma­chine build­ers get a com­plete, in­teg­rated mo­tion solu­tion for safety-re­lated ap­plic­a­tions. 

SMM 3.0 en­ables com­plete mo­tion sys­tems to achieve Safety In­teg­rity Level 3 (SIL 3) cer­ti­fic­a­tion. While the AKD2G drive has main­tained SIL 3 cer­ti­fic­a­tion since launch, the ad­di­tion of EnD­at 2.2 safe feed­back sup­port now provides a com­plete, matched solu­tion cap­able of meet­ing this rig­or­ous stand­ard. This is es­pe­cially im­port­ant where op­er­at­ors face fre­quent high-risk scen­ari­os, such as stage lift­ing sys­tems and heavy ma­ter­i­al hand­ling equip­ment. Fur­ther­more, the SIL 3 cap­ab­il­ity helps fu­ture-proof sys­tems so they can scale as safety re­quire­ments evolve.
 

Toshiba Elec­tron­ics Europe has launched two sine-wave pulse width mod­u­lated (PWM) drive con­trol­lers – TC78B043FNG and TC78B043FTG – for three-phase brush­less DC (BLDC) mo­tors, which can sup­port both sur­face per­man­ent mag­net (SPM) and in­teri­or per­man­ent mag­net (IPM) mo­tor types with low noise and high ef­fi­ciency. In re­cent years, there has been an in­creas­ing trend to use IPM types in pref­er­ence to SPM types for three-phase BLDC mo­tors to achieve low cost, high out­put, and high torque. Typ­ic­al ap­plic­a­tions in­clude home ap­pli­ances such as air con­di­tion­ers and air pur­i­fi­ers, as well as a wide range of in­dus­tri­al equip­ment. However, IPM mo­tors are prone to gen­er­at­ing vi­bra­tion and noise, so mo­tor con­trol­lers that re­duce noise and en­hance con­trol ef­fi­ciency are in high de­mand.

The newly re­leased devices in­cor­por­ate a high-res­ol­u­tion sine-wave drive and sup­port sine-wave start-up, which helps to re­duce vi­bra­tion and noise. In ad­di­tion, ac­cord­ing to the char­ac­ter­ist­ics and us­age of the mo­tor, vari­ous speed set­tings can be pro­grammed in­to the built-in non-volat­ile memory (NVM) via the Seri­al Peri­pher­al In­ter­face (SPI). This cap­ab­il­ity al­lows high-ef­fi­ciency mo­tor con­trol by ad­just­ing para­met­ers such as lead angle con­trol.

Pre-pro­grammed speed pro­files

A key dif­fer­ence between the two devices is that the NVM in the TC78B043FNG comes pre-pro­grammed with the ini­tial speed pro­file set­tings for com­mon mo­tors. This neg­ates the need to manu­ally pro­gram or con­fig­ure it fur­ther be­fore us­ing it, ac­cel­er­at­ing de­vel­op­ment time. Fur­ther­more, the TC78B043FNG has four ter­min­als: FGC ter­min­al, LA­TYPE ter­min­al, LAOFS ter­min­al, and LA ter­min­al. The voltage set­tings of these ter­min­als also al­low more de­tailed re­ad­just­ment of mo­tor con­trol para­met­ers on the NVM without the SPI in­ter­face, such as mo­tor lead angle con­trol.

Op­er­at­ing from a sup­ply ran­ging from 6V to 23V, these mo­tor con­trol­lers per­form over a wide tem­per­at­ure range from -40°C to +115°C. They also in­teg­rate thermal shut­down, un­der voltage lock­out, cur­rent lim­iter, over cur­rent de­tec­tion, and lock pro­tec­tion. Both devices in­clude built-in 5V reg­u­lat­ors, provid­ing a stable sup­ply for ex­tern­al com­pon­ents such as Hall sensors or lo­gic cir­cuits, re­du­cing the need for an ad­di­tion­al voltage reg­u­lat­or in the sys­tem design. The TC78B043FNG is housed in the widely used HTSSOP28 (6.3mm x 9.9mm) pack­age, mak­ing it easy to mount on the board due to its lead pack­age. On the oth­er hand, the TC78B043FTG is housed in a com­pact, lead­less WQFN20 (3.0 x 3.0mm) pack­age, en­abling mini­atur­isa­tion of the cir­cuit board and mount­ing in lim­ited spaces.
 

If you want to un­der­stand the fu­ture of in­dus­tri­al de­car­bon­iz­a­tion, look at the mo­tors be­hind every pump, fan, and con­vey­or. Ac­cord­ing to the In­ter­na­tion­al En­ergy Agency’s (IEA) En­ergy Ef­fi­ciency 2025 re­port, mo­tor sys­tems today ac­count for around 60% of glob­al in­dus­tri­al elec­tri­city de­mand and roughly one quarter of all elec­tri­city use world­wide.

Be­hind the num­bers is a simple story: in­dustry de­pends on mo­tors, and the plan­et now de­pends on how ef­fi­ciently they run. Yet more than half of all in­dus­tri­al mo­tors in op­er­a­tion are es­tim­ated to be over ten years old, and al­most a quarter are more than twenty years old. These age­ing as­sets of­ten run con­tinu­ously, kept in ser­vice on a “if isn’t broken, don’t fix it” basis – even though their in­ef­fi­ciency quietly drains en­ergy and pro­ductiv­ity with every hour they run.

In a world ra­cing to cut emis­sions and boost pro­ductiv­ity, this is one of the biggest op­por­tun­it­ies hid­ing in plain sight. Up­grad­ing the mo­tors that already power our world is a fast, tan­gible way for man­u­fac­tur­ers to use less en­ergy today, to­mor­row, and for years to come.

The po­ten­tial im­pact is enorm­ous. If the more than 300 mil­lion in­dus­tri­al mo­tor‑driv­en sys­tems op­er­at­ing today were up­graded to high‑ef­fi­ciency ver­sions, glob­al elec­tri­city use could be cut by up to 10%. The tools to un­lock those sav­ings already ex­ist, and syn­chron­ous re­luct­ance (Syn­RM) mo­tors are one of the clearest ex­amples of how in­dustry can act now, without hes­it­a­tion.

Cut­ting in­ef­fi­ciency and risk with Syn­RM tech­no­logy

ABB first in­tro­duced Syn­RM mo­tors in 2011 as a way to com­bine high ef­fi­ciency with sim­pli­city and ro­bust­ness. In­stead of re­ly­ing on mag­nets or com­plex ro­tor con­struc­tions, Syn­RM strips the design back to es­sen­tials. It de­liv­ers the per­form­ance of an ad­vanced mo­tor without rare earth ma­ter­i­als and with far less wasted en­ergy in­side the mo­tor it­self.

In a Syn­RM mo­tor, wind­ing tem­per­at­ures can be up to 30°C lower and bear­ing tem­per­at­ures up to 15°C lower than in a com­par­able in­duc­tion mo­tor. Less heat means less risk of fail­ure, which means less un­planned down­time – so op­er­at­ors avoid the dis­rup­tion and costs that in­ev­it­ably come when crit­ic­al equip­ment fails. And be­cause there are no mag­nets, Syn­RM means op­er­at­ors can avoid the price volat­il­ity and sup­ply‑chain risk of rare earth metals. That makes it a more pre­dict­able long‑term choice, help­ing man­u­fac­tur­ers sta­bil­ize costs and re­duce their de­pend­ence on glob­al sup­ply chains.

The IE6 Syn­RM range takes this tech­no­logy to the next lo­gic­al step. It brings per­form­ance in­to the main­stream by of­fer­ing IE6 Hy­per-Ef­fi­ciency as a stand­ard op­tion for key ap­plic­a­tions such as pumps, fans and com­pressors. Mo­tors of this class are no longer re­served for spe­cial projects or be­spoke en­gin­eer­ing; they fol­low tra­di­tion­al power and frame‑size com­bin­a­tions, so most of the time they can simply re­place older mo­tors without re­quir­ing a re­design of the sur­round­ing equip­ment.

The sav­ings hid­ing in every kilo­watt

Over a typ­ic­al 20‑year life­time, around 97% of a mo­tor’s total cost of own­er­ship is the elec­tri­city it uses. The pur­chase cost ac­counts for only about 2%, and main­ten­ance about 1%. When en­ergy dom­in­ates the cost of own­er­ship to this ex­tent, max­im­iz­ing ef­fi­ciency is the only ra­tion­al strategy. 

The step from high ef­fi­ciency to hy­per‑ef­fi­ciency may sound in­cre­ment­al, but in con­tinu­ous‑duty ap­plic­a­tions, the ef­fect quickly stacks up. In a 110 kW mo­tor ap­plic­a­tion run­ning 8,760 hours a year at around 75% load, up­grad­ing an ex­ist­ing IE4 Syn­RM mo­tor and drive pack­age to ABB’s IE6 Syn­RM pack­age de­liv­ers a ma­jor long-term gain. Over a typ­ic­al 20-year ser­vice life, an­nu­al sav­ings add up to roughly €51,200 and 92,200 kg of CO₂ – the equi­val­ent of tak­ing 21.5 gas­ol­ine‑powered cars off the road for a year. And for op­er­at­ors already think­ing of up­grad­ing from IE4 to IE5, go­ing one step fur­ther to IE6 can un­lock up to 76% great­er en­ergy and emis­sions sav­ings than an IE5 solu­tion. Plus, the ad­di­tion­al in­vest­ment re­quired for an IE6 pack­age over an IE4 one can be re­covered in around eight months.

IE6 ef­fi­ciency is proof that sav­ings are with­in reach – in lower en­ergy use, faster ROI and deep­er emis­sions cuts – es­pe­cially when these gains are mul­ti­plied across dozens or hun­dreds of mo­tors. And by cut­ting run­ning costs and re­du­cing ex­pos­ure to en­ergy price volat­il­ity, Syn­RM tech­no­logy helps man­u­fac­tur­ers sharpen their com­pet­it­ive­ness in mar­kets where both mar­gins and car­bon per­form­ance are un­der pres­sure.

Ef­fi­ciency as a man­age­ment dis­cip­line

The IEA’s ana­lys­is of more than 300 en­ergy man­age­ment case stud­ies around the world found that sites with struc­tured en­ergy man­age­ment sys­tems achieved av­er­age en­ergy sav­ings of 11% in the first years alone, with many reach­ing 30% or more over time. These im­prove­ments are rarely thanks to a single tech­no­logy. In­stead, they come from treat­ing en­ergy ef­fi­ciency as a man­age­ment dis­cip­line – start­ing with smarter equip­ment choices.

Hy­per‑ef­fi­cient mo­tors like ABB’s IE6 Syn­RM mo­tors do not re­quire rad­ic­al pro­cess changes or un­proven tech­no­lo­gies. They can be in­teg­rated in­to ex­ist­ing sys­tems and start re­du­cing us­age im­me­di­ately. They make it easi­er for en­ergy man­agers to hit de­car­bon­iz­a­tion tar­gets, stay ahead of tight­en­ing reg­u­la­tions, and show con­crete pro­gress to stake­hold­ers.

The sus­tain­ab­il­ity be­ne­fits start even be­fore the mo­tor is switched on. IE6 Syn­RM mo­tors are part of ABB’s Eco­Solu­tions port­fo­lio, which in­cludes third‑party‑veri­fied En­vir­on­ment­al Product De­clar­a­tions to sup­port trans­par­ent li­fe­cycle as­sess­ments and ESG re­port­ing. ABB is also us­ing low‑car­bon and re­cycled cop­per in mo­tor pro­duc­tion, re­du­cing em­bed­ded emis­sions by up to 200 kg of CO₂ per 75 kW mo­tor. 

As a res­ult, true high ef­fi­ciency is no longer con­fined to a few flag­ship projects, but can now be ap­plied as stand­ard across en­tire mo­tor fleets.

Mak­ing hy­per‑ef­fi­ciency the new nor­mal

In­dus­tri­al com­pan­ies today must do more with every unit of en­ergy they use, and simply keep­ing equip­ment run­ning is no longer enough. It has to run lean­er and clean­er than ever be­fore.

With IE6 Syn­RM mo­tors, up­grad­ing out­dated fleets be­comes one of the simplest ways to nav­ig­ate rising en­ergy costs and car­bon con­straints – and to turn en­ergy ef­fi­ciency in­to a guid­ing prin­ciple that defines the next gen­er­a­tion of in­dustry.

At ABB, we call this “En­gin­eered to Out­run”: the be­lief that there is al­ways an­oth­er step to take in ef­fi­ciency and sus­tain­ab­il­ity. By mak­ing hy­per‑ef­fi­ciency avail­able as a stand­ard solu­tion across a range of in­dus­tri­al ap­plic­a­tions, ABB is al­low­ing man­u­fac­tur­ers to treat mo­tor up­grades as a cent­ral pil­lar of their de­car­bon­iz­a­tion strategies. And in do­ing so, in­dustry can align growth with sus­tain­ab­il­ity, in­stead of trad­ing one for the oth­er.

To find out more, please vis­it: IE5 and IE6 Syn­chron­ous re­luct­ance safe area mo­tors

Phoenix Con­tact is ex­tend­ing its range of device con­nect­ors for the trans­mis­sion of data, sig­nals, and power. The new M8 and M12 ver­sions are suit­able for dir­ect in­teg­ra­tion in­to SMT sol­der­ing pro­cesses. The M12 SMD con­nect­ors are avail­able with dif­fer­ent pin as­sign­ments and cod­ings. This of­fers users nu­mer­ous ap­plic­a­tion op­tions. The con­nect­ors have been de­veloped for auto­mated as­sembly and there­fore en­able ef­fi­cient pro­duc­tion pro­cesses. In com­bin­a­tion with the push-pull hous­ing screw con­nec­tions, the con­nect­ors of­fer fu­ture­proof con­nec­tion tech­no­logy.

Design en­ables uni­form in­stall­a­tion height

The new design brings fur­ther ad­vant­ages: The op­tim­ized shield­ing concept re­duces mount­ing and spring forces, fa­cil­it­ates mount­ing and en­sures re­li­able shield­ing trans­mis­sion. The shortened align­ment pins make it pos­sible to as­semble the PCB on both sides. The uni­form in­stall­a­tion geo­metry of the com­pact con­nect­ors sim­pli­fies the device design and en­ables a uni­form in­stall­a­tion height across all ver­sions. The con­nect­ors meet the re­quire­ments of RoHS II without ex­emp­tion 6c and are there­fore fit for the fu­ture. 
 

TDK-Lambda in­tro­duces the TPS4500 single- or dual-out­put in­dus­tri­al power sup­plies with a 4500 W rat­ing. The mod­ules can be con­figured to share the loads in any pro­por­tion, up to the rated out­put spe­cific­a­tions, and are de­signed to op­er­ate in series or in par­al­lel to in­crease the out­put voltage or power. Cap­able of op­er­at­ing from a high voltage three-phase in­put in a 360 – 528 Vac Delta or Wye con­fig­ur­a­tion, the series can be used in mul­tiple ap­plic­a­tions, in­clud­ing test and meas­ure­ment equip­ment, semi­con­duct­or fab­ric­a­tion, ad­dit­ive man­u­fac­tur­ing, print­ers, lasers, and RF power amp­li­fi­ers. The high voltage, three-phase in­put avoids the re­quire­ment for costly step-down trans­formers and as­sists phase load cur­rent bal­an­cing. 

The TPS4500 series is fully fea­tured with isol­ated AC Fail, DC Good and dropped phase sig­nals, re­mote on/off, re­mote sense, and a 12 V, 0.3 A standby sup­ply. The PM­Bus™ com­mu­nic­a­tions in­ter­face en­ables com­pre­hens­ive re­mote mon­it­or­ing and con­trol. It provides real-time vis­ib­il­ity of key para­met­ers such as out­put voltage, out­put cur­rent, in­tern­al tem­per­at­ure, status sig­nals, and fan speed. Ad­di­tion­ally, PM­Bus™ al­lows pro­gram­ming of crit­ic­al set­tings, in­clud­ing out­put voltage, over­cur­rent lim­it, and re­mote on/off func­tion­al­ity. Nom­in­al out­puts of 92 V, 49 A and 184 V, 24.5 A are fully ad­justable via PM­Bus™: 92 V can be set from 10 – 96.5 V, and 184 V from 20 – 193 V.

Ro­bust design for op­er­a­tion in a wide tem­per­at­ure range

The TPS4500 mod­els have a typ­ic­al ef­fi­ciency of 93 %. The power sup­ply can start up in -40 °C tem­per­at­ures and op­er­ate in am­bi­ent tem­per­at­ures from -10 to +70 °C, de­rat­ing lin­early from 100 % to 80 % load from 50° to 60 °C, and from 80 % to 55 % at 70 °C.  The TPS4500 series’ en­clos­ure meas­ures 107 x 85 x 335 mm (W x H x D), mak­ing it suit­able for 2U high rack­ing sys­tems.

Safety cer­ti­fic­a­tions in­clude IEC/UL/CSA/EN62368-1 and carry the CE and UKCA mark­ing for the Low Voltage, EMC and RoHS Dir­ect­ives. The units also com­ply with EN55032-A con­duc­ted and ra­di­ated emis­sions stand­ards in the end sys­tem, meet IEC 61000-4 im­munity stand­ards, plus SEMI F47-0706 at 480Vac nom­in­al (Cri­ter­ia B). The power sup­ply has 3k Vac in­put to out­put, 2k Vac in­put to ground, and 500 Vdc out­put to ground isol­a­tion.
The TPS4500 series is de­signed to meet MIL-STD-810H, Meth­od 514.8, Proc I, Cat­egory 1, 10 (vi­bra­tion), and MIL-STD-810H, Meth­od 516.8, Pro­ced­ure I, IV (Lo­gist­ics) and VI (shock) stand­ards, en­sur­ing ex­cep­tion­al dur­ab­il­ity and re­li­ab­il­ity in harsh en­vir­on­ments.
 

The Traco Elec­tron­ic TMR 10WI series con­sists of isol­ated DC/DC con­vert­ers de­signed for ver­sat­il­ity, of­fer­ing a wide in­put range from 4.5 VDC to 75 VDC (4.5–18, 9–36 and 18–75 VDC). Thanks to their high ef­fi­ciency of up to 89%, these con­vert­ers achieve a com­pact SIP-8 form factor, without com­prom­ising thermal per­form­ance.

High tem­per­at­ure range and alti­tude rat­ing

Each unit is equipped with com­pre­hens­ive pro­tec­tion fea­tures, in­clud­ing short-cir­cuit pro­tec­tion, over­cur­rent lim­it­a­tion, un­der­voltage lock­out, and re­mote on/off con­trol. Cer­ti­fied to IEC/EN/UL 62368-1 stand­ards, the series sup­ports an op­er­at­ing tem­per­at­ure range of -40°C to +70°C and is rated for alti­tudes up to 5000 meters. Housed in a ro­bust plastic case, the TMR 10WI series is avail­able in both single and dual out­put con­fig­ur­a­tions, mak­ing it a re­li­able choice for a wide vari­ety of in­dus­tri­al ap­plic­a­tions.

SCHURTER coin cell su­per­ca­pa­cit­ors store and de­liv­er en­ergy ex­tremely fast and are avail­able in ho­ri­zont­al (SCCA) and ver­tic­al (SCCC) mount­ing ver­sions. Coin cell su­per­ca­pa­cit­ors are com­pact elec­tro­chem­ic­al en­ergy stor­age devices with a high ca­pa­city that can quickly store and re­lease elec­tric­al en­ergy. Com­pared to con­ven­tion­al bat­ter­ies, they of­fer sev­er­al ad­vant­ages, in­clud­ing high power dens­ity, a long cycle life, and fast charge and dis­charge rates. Su­per­ca­pa­cit­ors have around 10% of the en­ergy dens­ity of re­chargeable bat­ter­ies of the same weight. However, their power dens­ity is ten to a hun­dred times great­er. Su­per­ca­pa­cit­ors can there­fore be charged and dis­charged much faster. They can also with­stand many more char­ging cycles than re­chargeable bat­ter­ies, mak­ing them suit­able as a re­place­ment or sup­ple­ment wherever high switch­ing loads are re­quired.

Power Dens­ity vs En­ergy Dens­ity

Power dens­ity de­scribes how quickly an en­ergy stor­age device can re­lease or ab­sorb en­ergy. This is im­port­ant for ap­plic­a­tions re­quir­ing short-term high en­ergy out­puts, such as start­ing an en­gine. Su­per­ca­pa­cit­ors have a high power dens­ity, which en­ables them to provide en­ergy quickly. En­ergy dens­ity in­dic­ates how much en­ergy a stor­age device can hold over a longer peri­od. A high en­ergy dens­ity is es­sen­tial for ap­plic­a­tions re­quir­ing a con­tinu­ous en­ergy sup­ply.

The new coin cell su­per­ca­pa­cit­ors are avail­able for ho­ri­zont­al or ver­tic­al mount­ing. They can be used in sys­tems with a voltage of up to 5.5 V and have a ca­pa­cit­ance value ran­ging from 100 to 1,500 mF. The su­per­ca­pa­cit­ors are used in a vari­ety of ap­plic­a­tions, in­clud­ing backup power sup­plies, elec­tron­ic devices, re­new­able en­ergy sys­tems and med­ic­al devices. While they are most com­monly used for real-time clock backup, they can also be used for memory backup, bat­tery swap ride-through and LED or aud­ible alarms.
 

Sensata Tech­no­lo­gies an­nounced the launch of the SIM200 In­su­la­tion Mon­it­or­ing Device (IMD), de­signed to en­hance safety in the next gen­er­a­tion of the elec­tric vehicle eco­sys­tem. The SIM200 (IMD) is de­signed for con­tinu­ous act­ive mon­it­or­ing of un­earthed (Isol­ated Terra) DC sys­tems in­clud­ing char­ging sta­tions, elec­tric vehicles, and oth­er sys­tems op­er­at­ing above 60 VDC.

Con­tinu­ous “al­ways on” mon­it­or­ing 

In a high voltage sys­tem, elec­tric­al isol­a­tion is ac­com­plished by us­ing non-con­duct­ing bar­ri­ers such as in­su­la­tion on cables, plastic hous­ings on com­pon­ents, and phys­ic­al dis­tance. IM­Ds are needed to mon­it­or these sys­tems for fail­ures, which could al­low ex­cess cur­rent to flow where it should not and pose an elec­tro­cu­tion risk. Us­ing its pat­en­ted sig­nal in­jec­tion al­gorithm and pro­cessing cap­ab­il­it­ies, the SIM200 is de­signed to provide con­tinu­ous “al­ways on” mon­it­or­ing – even when the sys­tem is turned off or ex­per­i­en­cing large changes in voltage. This IMD solu­tion is also able to provide mon­it­or­ing of the total stored ca­pa­cit­ance in the sys­tem – func­tion­al­ity which is crit­ic­al for safety in to­mor­row's high-powered mega­watt char­ging ap­plic­a­tions and meet­ing fu­ture in­su­la­tion mon­it­or­ing spe­cific­a­tions.

Stand­ard Mod­ules from 60 to 1500V

Lever­aging tech­no­logy from Sensata’s 2021 ac­quis­i­tion of Sen­dyne Corp, the SIM200 mon­it­ors the in­su­la­tion of Isol­ated Terra sys­tems by in­ject­ing a small voltage through isol­a­tion res­ist­ors onto both the pos­it­ive and neg­at­ive high-voltage rails. The in­jec­tion pulses al­tern­ate between the pos­it­ive and neg­at­ive rails at set time peri­ods, and the sys­tem mon­it­ors these pulses against the sys­tem voltage to de­tect any safety con­cerns with the sys­tem and help trig­ger a shut­down if ne­ces­sary.

En­gin­eered to work seam­lessly across EV char­ging and oth­er plat­forms, the SIM200 is avail­able in a vari­ety of stand­ard mod­ules con­figured for ap­plic­a­tions from 60 V up to 1500 V. The device is UL 2231-2 re­cog­nized and has been tested to IEC 61557-8 re­quire­ments. Its com­mu­nic­a­tion frame­work has also been de­signed with in­puts from some of the world’s largest OEMs, with dual ded­ic­ated fault state out­puts, ro­bust self-dia­gnos­is func­tion­al­ity, as well as a mod­u­lar CAN 2.0B in­ter­face for de­tailed sys­tem in­form­a­tion.