Windows NT and Windows CE create scalable control solutions for
electronics OEM
ULTRA t Equipment Company is a manufacturer of processing equipment used in the semiconductor and microelectronics industries. Their equipment is involved in cleaning, chemical mixing and photoresist processing for the manufacture of products such as semiconductor wafers and flat panel displays. Their customers include IBM, Hewlett Packard and Motorola. Machines range from simple stand alone units that are loaded and unloaded by an operator to fully automatic robotic systems arranged as groups or clusters of the stand alone machines.
Ultra t's previous control solutions had to vary, since the price and performance requirements of their machines varied among applications. They are now standardizing all machine controls on a PC-based control architecture, using Think & Do Software and I/O hardware from Automationdirect.com, that provides them with a fully scalable control solution.
Think & Do Software is a PC-based control package that offers flowchart logic, HMI, motion and serial communications. Think & Do allows a programmer to develop his complete program, and then select either a Windows NT based PC or a Windows CE platform as the target hardware. ULTRA t Equipment selected the WinPLC, a Windows CE-based embedded PC processor which resides in a Direct LOGIC 205 PLC rack. The WinPLC provides backplane communication to I/O, onboard Ethernet and serial ports, and supports standard Windows communication tools such as DCOM and OPC. Through the Ethernet port, the WinPLC can communicate to both other WinPLC controllers, or to an NT-based master station. The WinPLC, priced at $699, allowed ULTRA t to solve their low end control solution at a competitive price while keeping the same software and programming environment for their larger Windows NT based systems.
John Flaagan, ULTRA t Equipment President comments, "Our products range from manual standalone processing systems to fully automated systems with multiple process modules and robotic handling. Our previous control solutions used PLCs at the low end, and sophisticated motion control at the top end. Because of the limitations of the control systems and pricing, there was no consistency in the controls on our product line. By switching to PC-based control and using Think & Do Software at both the Windows NT level and Windows CE level, we now have a common control platform across our entire product line. The WinPLC allows us to use much of the same flowchart logic on a small manual machine that we use on our more sophisticated machines. We even have the option of moving to a distributed control architecture with a Window NT based master station and Windows CE based distributed control. As a machinery builder, we often have to customize our machinery to meet special application needs. With common software for the NT and CE platforms we now have the ideal control solution."
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