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Priyanka Yussuf Senior Hardware Design Engineer, Schneider Electric C h a p t e r 2 Another application segment seeing widespread electrification and digitization is the industrial sector. When most people think of industrial, they tend to think of factories, but that's not necessarily the case. The industrial segment can encompass anything from factories and office buildings to electrical generators and air conditioners. Examples of digitized functions in the industrial space include automatic lighting control and heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) in a building. With such a broad set of applications, the industrial sector brings a very diverse set of needs. Similar to the automotive industry, the broad scale and complexity of industrial systems have led to the development of architectures where different functions are handled by individual modules, all of which communicate on networks. For example, a factory may have thousands of sensor nodes scattered throughout the building, with each node monitoring processes in real time and communicating those data back to a central processing and control unit. This architecture allows for decreased complexity and greater scalability in the design of these large industrial solutions. To make this system work, each edge sensor node needs to be controlled by its own MCU, which facilitates communication with the sensor and networking back to the control unit. 8-BIT FOR INDUSTRIAL An 8-bit microcontroller consumes less power thereby providing longer battery life and having a better balance of peripheral features than higher-bit devices. The key design requirements to consider when selecting microcontrollers for industrial applications are speed, complexity, peripherals, and flash memory." 10 The Mighty 8-Bit Microcontroller: Still Enabling Innovation in Modern Applications