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Carmakers are facing the next wave of automotive connectivity. Cars will extend their reach, tapping our homes, talking to nearby cars and connecting to myriad other devices. New challenge is to meet bandwidth demands.

Optima wanted to create a seamless digital process chain, starting with product and machine design and continuing through the engineering right on to production automation and increase the production flexibility.

By network-enabling industrial automation equipment, important tasks such as uploading/downloading programs, communicating between controllers, and generating e-mail alerts become possible. Unfortunately, the resources needed to design a solution that can seamlessly tie together a wide diversity of network environments that are widely dispersed, plus rapildly deploy that solution, can present a costly challenge to many equipment manufacturers. Virtually all of Rockwell Automation’s customers have widely dispersed and disparate network environments with a mix of 10Mb and 100Mb Ethernet devices. Having connectivity that would seamlessly accommodate either Ethernet standard became a necessity. Therefore, the company determined that a 10/100Mb Ethernet auto switching capability was required for the ENI interface. Two significant challenges faced the Rockwell design team. First, the small “footprint” of the ENI packaging made the task of finding a networking solution that would fit into the product design very daunting. In addition, time-to-market was a driving factor. In a highly competitive market, Rockwell Automation needed to deliver their network enabled controller products as quickly as possible, and could not afford long development cycles to integrate networking capabilities.