Real-time Bus for Multiprocessor-based Programmable Controller

In this paper, we propose a high performance system bus that facilitate real-time data transfer in programmable controllers used in factory automation. The proposed bus splits and merges bit data at hardware level and increases datatransfer efficiency. It provides a guaranteed tight real-time bound for normal periodic data transfer between the processing elements. The ability to facilitate urgent message transfer strongly recommended its use for an emergency situation in a sequence control system. Lastly, the performance of the proposed bus was estimated both analytically and by computer simulation. 1 Introduction Over the past decades, several studies of a high performance programmable controller (PC) have been conducted[1, 3, 4, 6]. The resultant, novel PCs, use array processor architecture, or multiprocessor architecture or both with a shared memory[1]. Generally, the sequence control program can be divided into several tasks, such as input/output (I/O) processing, communicating, ..