Prof. N. K. Khosla of Department of Metallurgical Engineering and Materials
Science
and his students, colleagues in Electrical Engineering have developed and
patented a
cost effective wired communication system involving Scalable Intelligent
Multiple Bit
Addressable bus (SIMBA). SIMBA is a type of bus system which can be used
for interdevice
serial communication in industrial monitoring, control and automation and
other signaling applications.
Currently used field buses are available only in the high speed application
domain,
need repeaters for long distance communication and generally require expensive
and
complex devices to implement them. The cost-effectiveness of this invention
makes the device ideally suited for a small
to mid-sized manufacturing businesses that are looking to automate and
control their process. The flexibility in the networking
topology of SIMBA is a lucrative option to update systems with low budget
applications.
The researchers tested the SIMBA in a pipeline corrosion monitoring process.
A unique feature of the SlMBA device was
that it derived its power for communication from itself by "bus shorting" the
2-wire communication channel. The self-powering
capability of the device also makes this invention eco-friendly.
Though the use of wireless devices is becoming increasingly popular and
convenient, majority of the households, educational
institutes and office systems rely on their broadband and intra-network
connectivity on serial communication
devices. SIMBA can provide a communication system that can be effectively
interfaced with Wide Area Networks.
Because of its simplicity, the SIMBA architecture allows addition of
new devices to the system with the intelligence to
self-discover their bus specific parameters, such as a dynamically
allocated address.
Indian patent application no. 386/MUM/2004 Patent grant no. 212327
Inventors: N K Khosla, H Ramamurthy, A John, V Shah, R Aggarwal, and P Sahni
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