Issue link: https://resources.mouser.com/i/1437657
6 ADI | Industry 4.0 and Beyond In contrast, in a manufacturing environment, the impact can be high, from wasted materials to accidental human harm. For control systems to work, the message must get to its destination reliably, on time, every time. As a result, Industrial Ethernet has emerged as the technology of choice at the control level of the operating technology. The goal is to enable seamless connectivity not just between information technology (IT) and high-level OT networks but right down through the various layers of the factory's OT network to the end node sensor (Figure 3). Today, complex, power- hungry gateways are required to enable connectivity from the lower levels of the OT network to Ethernet at higher layers, where a converged IT/OT network is required. A plant-wide, interoperable automation network based on Ethernet would eliminate the need for these gateways, thereby simplifying the network itself. Protocol gateways used to translate and enable connection to the upper layer of the OT network are not directly addressable and have resulted in isolation in the network. This data isolation limits the ability to share information across the factory floor. This is contrary to the vision of Industry 4.0 outlined earlier, where manufacturers want to collect telemetry data from the OT side to drive analytics and business processes on the IT side. With determinism in packet delivery and timing guaranteeing a mandatory requirement for control applications, many vendors undertook efforts to provide real-time protocols suitable for OT networks. This resulted in solutions that, while deterministic, were specific to each vendors' protocol. This, in turn, led to a host of incompatible solutions, with different types of communication protocols running in different manufacturing cells, each of which could not interoperate. This perpetuates data isolation or data islands. A solution is needed that enables different manufacturing cells running different protocols to coexist and share the network to guarantee their control traffic is not compromised. The answer lies in time-sensitive networking (TSN), a vendor-neutral, real-time Ethernet standard based on the IEEE 802.1 Figure 3: Automation pyramid. (Source: Analog Devices, Inc.) 3 4 Figure 4: Time-sensitive networking features. (Source: Analog Devices, Inc.) AS A RESULT, INDUSTRIAL ETHERNET HAS EMERGED AS THE TECHNOLOGY OF CHOICE AT THE CONTROL LEVEL OF THE OPERATING TECHNOLOGY.