[Engineering Feature]
USB Flexes Its Industrial Strength
Lean facilities in the industrial realm looking to make even quicker changes more simply may want to consider the improved USB standard.
MANY DRIVERS When adding new modules, driver support becomes an issue. However, this usually isn’t the case with USB, which has broad support from most popular operating systems.
“Once you buy silicon, there’s no additional driver development. That’s a tremendous value added for designers,” says Bohm. “In lab environments, there’s been a lot of x86 and Linux development so there’s a huge support structure that comes with USB.”
However, that support structure doesn’t span the entirety of the diverse industrial field. Though USB drivers are often seen as ubiquitous, areas still exist in which unusual or custom products aren’t plugand- play compatible. Drivers are one of those areas.
“There are a number of classes of drivers, and the complexity behind them is growing,” says Tony Zarola, DSP product line manager at Analog Devices Inc. “USB is so common, people make assumptions that aren’t always true. It’s not easy to implement if you don’t have the right drivers.”
The availability of drivers varies for different chips and operating systems. Parts with smaller industry usage are less likely to have broad support. That’s more important in industrial applications, where many drivers for unusual products may not readily appear in libraries.
Zarola notes that when process control data must be time-stamped, drivers that support this mode may not be widely available, forcing equipment designers to write their own or search for partners. Most chipmakers have partnerships that extend beyond the mainstream to include many of these unusual drivers, he adds.
Reprints
