Ethernet-based communication increasingly dominates even industrial applications, where mostly the standard functions of operating systems cannot keep up with—real-time mechanisms are necessary.
The Berlin company Kithara Software announces the new Socket Module as part of the product range »RealTime Suite« 2008, which is capable to realize industrial communication based on the protocols TCP and UDP in real-time. The software thereby surpasses the possibilites of the Windows operating systems, which are often not suitable to solve industrial demands because of their limited real-time capabilities.
Even when the Packet Module was announced as part of the product range »RealTime Suite«, it was easily possible to communicate in real-time over selected Ethernet controllers. Yet the protocol was either limited to raw Ethernet or the user had to realize the appropriate higher protocol by himself. This limitation is not valid anymore using the Socket Module.
“Communication over sockets is easily applicable and familiar to almost every programmer” opines Uwe Jesgarz, managing director of Kithara Software, and he further states: “Using the Socket Module from Kithara TCP and UDP can be realized in real-time under Windows. This is among others required in industrial automation and the control and drive engineering.”
The Socket Module provides real-time data communication over selected Fast Ethernet cards (IntelPro/100 and RealTek 8139) as well as network cards with Gigabit Ethernet controllers (Intel Pro/1000), so that even fast measurement aquirement or industrial image processing are feasible.
In order to achieve real-time capabilities, the network controllers are directly controlled. This offers the entire bandwidth of the connection and the immediate reaction on incoming data packages in real-time.
The socket application can be created by the developer as he used to do—comfortably within the application development environment, which can be programmed in C/C++ or Delphi or embedded into a C#.NET application using a DLL.
Uwe Jesgarz
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