AVnu Alliance has announced an expansion into the industrial control market. The Alliance has also revealed three new members: Belden, and its brands Hirschmann, Tofino Security, GarrettCom and Lumberg Automation; General Electric; and National Instruments.
These companies, from the industrial, automation and IT infrastructure sectors, are driving forces in the recent expansion, working within the AVnu Alliance to develop the foundations needed for industrial applications, based on the common elements of Audio Video Bridging and Time Sensitive Networking (AVB/TSN).
The addition of the industrial market brings a fourth strand to the Alliance’s activities, alongside professional AV, consumer and automotive.
“It is incredibly important for GE to support and stay up to date on the evolving open standards in the industrial control market. Since AVnu Alliance is the only community consortium driving the expansion of AVB and TSN standards, we are excited to join and offer our expertise to the efforts,” said John Garrity, product line leader for General Electric Intelligent Platforms.
“AVnu certification will ensure interoperability across multi-vendor solutions and our continued contribution to the TSN standards will help us deliver the next generation of reliable networked products to our customers. We are excited to join AVnu Alliance and contribute to the workgroups as the Alliance expands into this new market and continues to build on the open standards that are currently evolving.”
Andreas Dreher, strategic technology manager at Belden added: “IEEE and AVnu Alliance’s work to bring open standards to industrial applications provides a great venue to amplify Belden’s long history of standards work, and we recognise the immense value open standards offer to our customers.”
The new capabilities of these open standards enable high-speed closed loop control networks to support any Ethernet device using standard IT components and creates the needed foundation for IoT integration with industrial production.
The Alliance has previously announced support for TSN in automotive applications such as drive-by-wire and autonomous driving. The industrial market, which parallels work that AVnu Alliance members have been doing in the automotive segment, is a $150 billion a year market space and creates a pathway to the future of IoT.
“This new segment is very exciting for the Alliance. Adding new members who are from this space and the evolution of the standards makes AVnu Alliance and Time Sensitive Networking poised for rapid growth in this market,” said Kip Compton, VP and general manager of the Internet of Things (IoT) systems and software group, Cisco.
He concluded: “AVnu Alliance remains dedicated to its core work in professional audio and video, consumer electronics and automotive. Broad market expansion of AVB/TSN with wide deployment will only benefit all members and markets – both from a cost perspective as well as assuring long-term support for the capabilities in standard components.”
