Schneider Electric aims to expand industrial PC in APAC

Schneider Electric expects demand for industrial PC in Asia Pacific region such as South Korea and Taiwan to grow steeply going forward.

The high up-cycle for semiconductors from 5G and artificial intelligence demand will allow for this large growth, the company said at an online press event in South Korea.

Human machine interface (HMI) were used to control industrial sites and automated production lines but there were limitations in operating complex and varied applications, the company said. Industrial PC can use HMI to process difficult tasks more easily.

Demand for industrial PCs are on the rise due to expanded supply of high-performance fanless CPU and SSD. According to Market&Market, last year, the global industrial PC market was worth US$4.4 billion. This will grow 5.4% on average per year to 2025 to be worth US$5.7 billion.

Industrial PC is used in automobile, chemical and energy facilities due to many automation features and the hazardous work environments.

Semiconductor plans require precise works and manufacturing and therefore uses industrial PCs. Semiconductor uses I/0 and motion cards, requiring speed. Cleanrooms require fanless equipment to prevent dusts from coming in and therefore also uses industrial PCs.

Most of the programmable logic controllers used to control semiconductor lines have been replaced with PCs. It is difficult to analyze data and quantify them with PLC. More PCs are using Microsoft Window OS.

Schneider Electric launched Pro-face PS6000 industrial PC in September last year. The company said the PC has high stability and flexible module, allowing it to meet various needs of automation engineers, operators and production mangers.

PS6000 has an open architecture and comes with Pro-face’s SCADA solution, BLUE Open Studio, which supports animation, email and local recipe management. It also supports Message Queuing Telemetry Transport. This allows the PC to be synced with HMI and various other devices.

PS6000 supports HMI design customizing. It comes with four types of CPU and seven kinds of displays. They also support UHD resolution. The display also supports glove mode touch for use in clean rooms.