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Industrial automation is a promising market for global chip designers after automobiles. Now, with more and more chip giants joining in, a fierce battle for supremacy is brewing in this battlefield.After all, from a local perspective, this is an industry driven by China's grand strategy for a long time, which is why the domestic market for industrial automation related equipment has maintained a fairly stable growth rate in recent years.
Take industrial robots as an example. According to statistics, the sales volume of industrial robots in China reached 156,400 in 2018, an increase of nearly 15% year-on-year. China has been the world's largest industrial robot sales market for six consecutive years.This has led an increasing number of chip companies to target tens of thousands of factories in China in an attempt to gain a foothold in China's industrial automation market before the policy dividend is fully paid.
However, to seize the huge industrial automation market, it is necessary to face up to many challenges, including application scene dispersion, security and confidentiality, equipment interconnection, data processing and decision analysis.As the core power to promote technological change, chip is in urgent need of more innovation along with the changes in the demand for application scenarios in the wave of intelligent interconnection.As a witness and major participant of this technological change, where is TI's competitiveness in the field of industrial automation?
The significance of comprehensive platform
Industrial automation is a big market for TI. In recent years, with the prevalence of AI, 5G and IoT concepts, the demand in the industrial sector has also changed considerably."Over the last year or two, we've seen an acceleration in the industrial market.But now, many industrial automation applications are actually very scattered, different applications generally have different standard protocols and different platforms, which makes it very time-consuming and laborious for enterprises to do research and development design for different platforms and standards.Texas instruments processor business manager Sameer Wasson said.
"For example, many large factories now buy equipment from different companies," he said. "how do these different companies connect their equipment?Sameer Wasson goes further.
This is why TI launched a comprehensive platform. In the final analysis, it is to help program developers save costs and time to market.Reporter learned that, the TI Sitara AM6x processor through advanced integration technology, with advanced industrial network can meet the demand of the rapid development of the industry of 4.0, the functions of safety and security of high reliability and integration capabilities as well as an integrated platform of extensible processor series, can promote modern people plant to a higher intelligence and full automatic acceleration.TI have a series of products, including from low-end to high-end, from monocyte/multi-core ARM processor to ARM + DSP combination products, in addition to the function of communications industry itself, control and sensing, have protection and isolation, power optimization, safety, security and other supporting technology to function module, can all meet the needs of industrial automation scene of flexibility.
"Edge + cloud" computing enhances the "hard" power of AI
Edge computing is a very popular concept at present, which makes both giants and start-ups in the chip industry compete to develop or launch AI chips that are good at edge computing to meet the growing demand for side AI applications in the market.Although the edge computing capability is necessary in the factory automation scenario, it is obviously not enough to use edge computing for data processing.Because many applications still need a lot of data collection and centralized processing, a single edge computing AI chip is obviously not able to handle such a huge data set processing work.Therefore, TI's industrial automation processor is specially equipped with the dual features of edge computing and cloud computing, further enriching the application environment and scenarios of this series of chips.
Wu jianhong, business development director of Texas instruments China
What are the requirements of industrial automation scenarios for processor edge computing and cloud computing?Wu jianhong, business development director of Texas instruments China told reporters: "now there are a lot of industrial applications are starting to do cloud computing, but this kind of application needs to do real-time processing and response quickly, in this case, the cloud server is not necessarily a good choice.At this time, some of the more powerful platform to do real-time local computing function, from this point of view, the performance of the platform will also have high requirements.
TI deep learning development route
For local operation performance, in part of the data collecting and processing, the edge of the calculation is more and more important, Wu Jianhong think: "which includes AI also contains some real-time operation, so from this perspective, we find that more and more by MCU to do in the past, are now in need of some larger ARM processor, is used to solve the problem of some of the side of the edge of the real-time data processing.Now inside the factory, for example, the application of the sensor is more and more, not only perceive the environment temperature and humidity, also contain such higher-end millimeter wave radar and laser radar sensor, some different sensors combinations, needs to be inside of multi-channel sensor data to the processor, to do real-time calculation.However, on the other hand, some data will need to be transferred to the cloud, especially some related to the company's business. The production line and product category will be adjusted according to the business operation situation. This kind of application requires local computing and some cloud platforms will be integrated together.
Sameer Wasson offered an interesting example: "different application scenarios or different devices may have different requirements for cloud and edge computing.For example, the automatic door in a factory, once the sensor senses that someone has walked through, the door will automatically open, if no one walks through, the door will automatically close, this kind of function is basically based on the edge of the local side to achieve.However, if you want to know how many people enter and exit the automatic doors in the factory within a day, and the specific moment of the door opening and closing, if there are more doors, the system needs to collect very large data, which needs to be placed in the cloud for computing.So, for these different big data and small data applications in the automated factory, edge side and cloud computing are actually very necessary.
"Safety crisis" of industrial automation
Intelligent interconnection into application scenarios not only brings convenience, but also brings a very serious data security crisis.Especially in the industrial automation scenario, with the deepening integration of the new generation of information technology and the whole process of industrial production, the number of industrial equipment networking grows rapidly worldwide, and new technical architecture, production system and operation mode also bring new security risks and challenges.
According to the report of the national center for industry and information security, the number of global security vulnerabilities reached up to 432 in 2018, up 14% year-on-year, and the proportion of medium and high-risk vulnerabilities reached up to 99%.Large-scale and high-intensity security incidents, such as the attack on chlorine gas stations in Ukraine and the national power outage in venezuela, have made governments of all countries focus on the security of industrial information.The public server of Level One Robotics, a Canadian automobile supplier, leaked the confidential documents of over 100 global automobile enterprises, and TSMC's key business data was attacked by ransomware virus, resulting in the shutdown of the production line, which has brought serious damage to the normal operation of the company.
At national symposium on information and software services, ministry of information and software services department Xie Shaofeng once said: "at present, the industrial information security situation is still grim, industrial field frequency is high risk vulnerabilities, blackmail virus attack means such as increasingly diverse, serious impact on the industrial production run in terms of our country, from the protection level, discernible on the network of industrial automation control system and equipment more than 15000, spread all over the country 31 provinces (autonomous regions and municipalities).Most of them lack safety protection or even run naked.
As the main core of these industrial automation equipment, chip naturally needs to achieve perfection in security and confidentiality mechanism to prevent the whole industrial automation system from "running naked", which is the advantage of TI.After all, after many years of great changes in the automobile market, TI chips are now all over the world and become the standard equipment of most automobiles. In fact, the requirements for safety in the automobile field are higher than in the industrial field, which means that TI can easily replicate the safety technology and experience in the automobile field to the industrial market.
Wu jianhong said: "unmanned factory, its security protection is a very important link, equipment connectivity, if there is no strong security mechanism, someone will break the system, which will cause great security risks to the factory.Of course, in the final analysis, in order to be an unmanned factory, even if there is one person in the factory, we need to ensure the safety of the equipment and not to hurt the lives of some workers. This is what more and more factories need to consider.TI has great advantages in the field of automotive safety, and we have spent a lot of time in the past years to bring functional safety technology in the field of automotive to the field of industrial automation. We believe that this strength can bring enough safe and reliable solutions for modern industrial automation scenarios.
summary
Thanks to years of rich experience and technical strength in the field of automotive chips, it is no longer difficult for TI to make a rapid and smooth transition to the industrial automation scene.The comprehensive industrial automation processor platform launched this time has set a benchmark for the industry in the characteristics of AI, communication connection, security and application diversification adaptability, etc. At the same time, it further confirms the strength of TI as a leading international IC design factory, which is not out of The Times but also beyond The Times.
But then there is the question of how to tap into China's huge domestic market for factory automation.TI still needs to fully consider the problem from a global perspective. How to make use of the unique marketization and cost advantages of the products, keep in line with the psychology of Chinese customers, and make more domestic factories willing to accept this solution will be the key for TI to cut the "big cake" of domestic industrial automation in the future.
