On behalf of Invensys, ifp is developing a high-availability interface card for use in a process control system in the chemical industry. The card is designed with double redundancy to ensure maximum reliability in the chemical processes. A central feature is the hot plug & play capability: a card exchange during operation must not cause any impairment of the process engineering systems.
Both interface cards communicate continuously with each other so that in the event of a failure, one card seamlessly takes over the functions of the other. The cards support both Profibus and proprietary Invensyss I/O buses. An AMCC PowerPC 440 GX serves as the central processing unit. The system runs under Linux, enhanced by the Xenomai real-time extension to meet real-time requirements. Development is based on a customized GNU toolchain.
