Robust Connection
Board-to-Board Connectors for the Industry
In the past five years, hardly any other buzzword has driven the industrial production and automation sector like “the intelligent factory”. Otherwise diverse markets as the USA, Europe and China agree on the implications: Industrial production must become more networked, more efficient, more intelligent and thus more internationally competitive. Robust board-to-board connectors are an important step along this path.
One of the drivers of a increased competitiveness should be enhanced versions of production resources that lead to higher performance, more flexible production lines and lower manufacturing costs. For the year 2020, various analyses forecast almost 20 billion (IDC, 2016), almost 30 billion (Gartner, 2017) or even up to 50 billion (CISCO IBSG, 2011) IT-networked “things”. Even the most cautious forecast means that in just two years there will be almost three times more things communicating with each other than people.
In addition to the ubiquitous smart devices, these things also include the intelligent devices of the industrial production: controllers, power supplies, I/Os, HMIs and many more. These devices themselves have become more intelligent in recent years. Their electronic components, such as processors, could be produced at substantially lower cost and thus became more powerful and numerous. Together with their components, industrial electronic devices themselves became ever smaller, more powerful and more numerous. As a result, more intelligence from a formerly central and strictly hierarchical unit moved decentrally into the field.
Stay tuned to our blog for the second part of this article, and feel free to contact us at marketing@phoenixcontact.com.sg if you have any queries!