In Business

Staff -- Control Engineering, 6/1/2003

• National Instruments (NI, Austin, TX) reports that European sensor vendors are joining NI's Plug & Play Sensors Program. This is a collaborative effort by NI and sensor vendors to gain widespread adoption of IEEE P1451.4, which is a proposed standard for analog sensors that would reportedly make integrating "smart" sensors into measurement systems as easy as connecting a mouse to a computer.
• To expand its presence in the $60-billion and growing global sensors and instrumentation market, GE Industrial Systems (Plainville, CT) recently purchased SI Pressure Instruments, previously a unit of Hill & Smith Holding PLC. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. SI Pressure Instruments will become part of GE Druck (Leicester, U.K.), which is a unit of GE Industrial Systems' measurement business.
• Entivity Inc. (Ann Arbor, MI) has released its Steeplechase Visual Logic Controller (VLC) 6.1 software. It includes Transaction Express as the newest component of its PC-based control system. Transaction Express is a global data port that allows control engineers and IT professionals to gather and modify data in Entivity's data tables.

To provide protection against noise and fault conditions, Texas Instruments Inc. (Dallas, TX) recently introduced what it reports are the world's first extended, common-mode RS-485 transceivers. TI's SN65HVD2X devices reportedly more than double Telecommunications Industry Alliance/Electronic Industries Alliance's (TIA/EIA) present RS-485 requirements.