Yesterday, VDC presented the Embeddy Award for the hardware
category at the Design East Embedded System Conference in Boston. After careful
consideration, we chose the Hercules RM46x ARM Cortex-R4 safety microcontroller
from Texas Instruments. The Hercules RM46x that was presented to our team is
designed for safe motor control applications and is further enhanced by the
accompanying SafeTI design packages and a safe power management product that
was also announced at the show. Our embedded hardware team made the Hercules
RM46x the Embeddy winner because we believe it addresses several key themes we
are seeing in the overall machine and process safety markets.
As a general rule, the Embeddy award process considers product announcements and briefings, and/or demonstrations. Each qualifying product is evaluated based upon their corporate, technological and industry significance and availability.
Functional Safety research conducted by VDC Research in 2011 found that OEMs and Systems Integrators are always looking for new components and tools that enable them to safely integrate systems and total solution sets in ways that prevent injuries to humans. To do this, it is important for the controller to have redundant features that can detect any malfunction of itself and/or the hardware that it is connected to. VDC believes that the Hercules RM46x goes a long way to enable an OEM to produce motorized equipment that has the targeted SIL and ratings meets the necessary standards such IEC 61508 and ISO 26262. The resulting products that will be created by using the RM46x are critical to many markets including the process industry, industrial automation/robotics, medical equipment, as well as transportation infrastructure and electric vehicles.
The Embeddy Award for hardware was presented before the keynote speech on Wednesday to TI’s Dev Pradhan who is the Product Line Manager for the Hercules series of microcontrollers.
In the next few days we will post the part-2 of the Design East ESC show blog where we will highlight many other interesting products and companies that we saw at the show. Stay tuned!!
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