英译汉翻译USB在工业中的应用.doc

USB in Industrial Applications For industrial automation users, technology giveth and taketh away. On one hand advances in semiconductors and software result in smarter and more capable computers and machines, making the job of automating a process easier and more robust. On the other hand those same advances can spell trouble. Automation products have long lifetimes that are measured in decades and not years. So advances in technology – particularly PC technology – may mean that automation products and applications have to change, sometimes painfully. The question for industrial users then becomes what change should be made? And what can be done to avoid a repeat of this problem in the future? Consider the PC’s internal bus, the electrical pathway used, in part, for communication with the outside world. At this time and for that case, Advantech believes the answer to both questions is the aptly named Universal Serial Bus or USB. This bus change in industrial PCs is a result of changes in the larger market. Currently, PCI-Express is on its way to becoming a new backplane standard for PCs. So automation users are faced with the prospect of changing how their devices interface with industrial computers. As an added twist, embedded processor boards are increasingly popular and frequently these boards come with no extendable bus, either PCI-Express based or one based on another standard. For example, a study by Venture Development Corp. of Natick, Mass. predicted the share of shipments of larger form factor embedded boards, those larger than 70 square inches, will decline by 9.7 percent from 2004 to 2008 while the overall market grows by nearly 12 percent in dollar volume shipments over the same time period. The growth will come from boards having only USB ports and no extendable bus. Any solution to this bus predicament must enable communication that is high speed, deterministic, robust, and capable of covering the needed distance. The solution also must build upo