Designing a Robust IIoT to SCADA Gateway
ToDay, factories and production facilities are becoming more advanced in order to improve productivity and safety. These advances are based on converting to open or Ethernet network communication. Several technical requirements demanded of the equipment used at factories include support for open network communications protocols, such as PROFINET, EtherCAT, CAN, and Modbus. However, there are additional buses that provide high-speed, real-time performance and low power consumption to achieve high productivity, such as EtherCAT, PROFINET IRT, and SERCOSIII. In our first class, we will look at some of these protocols and their needs.
In our second class, we will investigate an innovative example circuit for interfacing with the myriad industrial Ethernet standards: the Renesas RZ/N1D chip and its development board set. The RZ/N1D is a multiprocessor system-on-a-chip that provides dual ARM Cortex-A7 cores for application processing and system control along with a Cortex M3 chip as a dedicated control processor for up to five high-speed Ethernet ports. We will look at depth at the various other ports and features of the hardware provided in this 400 pin BGA IC.
Meeting the challenge of designing an industrial controller or IIoT gateway is a daunting process when we are faced with multiple industrial Ethernet protocols. In our third class, we will look at the Generic Open Abstraction Layer (GOAL) from PORT GmbH. Provided by Renesas as middleware for their Ethernet communication and control block, GOAL allows the development of an application independent of the protocols implemented at each port.
In our penultimate class, we will build on the GOAL stacks and build interfaces for some sample industrial Ethernet protocols and monitor them with a basic Linux-based application.
Now that we have our communication I/O designed, we will build and test a representative solution for our Industrial Internet of Things design in our final class. We also will look at how we can implement the safety and security features that will be needed for a robust IIoT solution.
Charles J. Lord, PE is an embedded systems consultant and trainer with over 40 years' experience in system design and development in medical, military, and industrial applications. For the last twelve years, he has specialized in the integration of communication protocols into clients' products, including USB, Ethernet, and low-power wireless including ZigBee, 6LoWPAN, LoRa, and Thread. He has taught classes in these protocols for Freescale, Renesas, various universities and conferences including ESC and Arm TechCon. He has been a design partner with Freescale/NXP, Microchip, and Renesas. He also teaches webinars for various clients on IoT and embedded systems topics. He earned his BS in electrical engineering from N.C. State University in Raleigh, N.C. and provides training and consulting services through his company, Blue Ridge Advanced Design, in Asheville, N.C. He is a licensed professional engineer in NC and a senior member of the IEEE. In his volunteer work at the IEEE, he has served at many levels from local to regional to board committees. He is currently the chair of the IEEE Western NC Section, NC Council and was general chair of IEEE SoutheastCon 1995 and 2017