AVnu Alliance, the industry consortium promoting open standards-based networking through certification, has announced a new Industrial market segment to meet the needs of the Industrial Internet of Things (IoT) market. The AVnu Alliance already has market segments for Automotive, Pro-AV and consumer electronics.
With the expansion into the industrial control market, AVnu Alliance announces three new members, Belden, (which owns the Hirschmann, Tofino Security, GarrettCom and Lumberg Automation brands), General Electric, and National Instruments, a test, measurement and embedded systems provider for engineers and scientists.
These companies are working within the Alliance to develop the foundational elements needed for industrial applications, based on the common elements of AVB/TSN. The industrial segment is also supported by existing AVnu Alliance members such as Broadcom, Cisco, Intel, Interval Zero, Marvell, Micrel, Vitesse, Xilinx and XMOS.
Standard Ethernet is evolving to enable next generation control systems. This will allow convergence of low latency control traffic and standard Ethernet traffic on the same network for demanding applications like multi-axis motion control, providing a foundation for more advanced manufacturing and production models where data can be shared more flexibly between layers of the control system and where Internet of Things (IoT) technology can be applied into production environments. The new capabilities of these open standards enable high-speed closed loop control networks to support any Ethernet device using standard IT components and creates the needed foundation for IoT integration with industrial production.
The Alliance has previously announced support for TSN in automotive applications such as drive-by-wire and autonomous driving. The Industrial market, which parallels work that AVnu Alliance members have been doing in the Automotive segment, is a $150 billion a year market space and creates a pathway to the future of IoT.