Applications

Industrial PCs were first utilized in factory automation manufacturing processes in controlling, monitoring, and testing equipment and machinery, but they were limited to Single Board Computers. With the standardization and low-pricing trend of PCs, the PC-Based industrial PCs have come to optimize the mainstream industrial automation applications.

The primary differentiation of industrial PCs from standard PCs is their industrial-grade motherboards supporting multiple expansion with ample PCle and PCI slots. Industrial-grade motherboards also provides several I/O ports (ie: Ethernet, VGA, DVI, HDMI, COM, RS-232/422/485, PS/2, USB ports, etc.) to acquire data transmission and to support all types of peripheral devices and accessories. The I/O ports are commonly designed for the front-end to speed up the applications of ATE (Automatic Test Equipment). The diverse expansion slots and I/O ports enable industrial PCs to have high expansion capabilities to connect with all industrial controllers, such as PLC (Programmable Logic Controller) and RTU (Remote Terminal Unit), or all types of expansion modules, to accommodate the complex industrial environment.

As there is a diverse range of industrial motherboards such as ATX, Micro ATX, Mini-ITX, ETX, etc., the slots of these motherboards vary, so there are various chassis. Furthermore, industrial PCs inherently need to upgrade their system architectures due to frequent changes in production flows, so the expandable motherboard and chassis are very critical. To facilitate convenient system maintenance and expansion, the chassis of industrial PCs features all kinds of opening mechanism such as single side-panel, L-Type, U-Type, and so forth, to address their possible installation locations. A more user-friendly design for industrial-PC applications requires minimize screw usage, or even adopts tool-less thumb screws which allows a maintenance person to carry out quick work.

In terms of exterior design, industrial PCs are comprised of Tower, Rack, and Compact. Regardless of the types of industrial PC, system protection is a fundamental and critical demand, which entails basic features such as dust-proof, waterproof, static-proof, shock-absorbing, vibration-proof, effective cooling, backup power supply, defect detection, and so forth. Advanced features such as wide operating temperature support, wide operating pressure support, EMP protection, and so forth is also available to satisfy all types of highly demanding industrial environment.

Industrial PC Working Flow Chart

Industrial automation requires ultra-reliable platforms to ensure uninterrupted and stable equipment and system operations, and consequently, data integrity. The industrial-grade Wide Temp SSDs of Solid State Storage Technology Corporation can meet the requirements of industrial automation applications, as they all pass the wide-operating-temperature tests before leaving the factory. The SSDs are tested to ensure their normal functioning within the temperature range of industrial application scenarios offered by customers without any component damage, data loss, read-write abnormality, and so forth. The industrial-grade SSDs produced by Solid State Storage Technology Corporation also pass the extreme voltage stress test, as well as comply with the Anti-Vibration standard of the US military standard, MIL-STD-810G, and Anti-Shock standard of the US military standard, MIL-STD-202G and MIL-STD-883.