COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. — Echelon Corp. is offering early samples of an adaptive industrial-control chip called Pyxos FT, which Echelon anticipates could spur a market several times larger than the LONworks home-control and automation environment.

Pyxos FT (free topology) is intended to be used with sensors and actuators in markets such as wiring-harness factory applications and water treatment, as well as in emerging propulsion, vehicular and office-automation systems.

Michael Tennefoss, Echelon's vice president of marketing, said Pyxos has been on its roadmap since 1990, but the company had to wait until a low-cost but adaptive alternative could be offered to both wireline networks and emerging wireless networks like ZigBee.

"The varieties of Ethernet for industrial embedded control probably will be limited to high-end applications. The costs will limit the degree to which we compete directly with Ethernet,” Tennefoss predicted.

PyxosPoint nodes are configured as all-digital nodes, though a node can be used in conjunction with a low-cost microcontroller with analog inputs in order to create mixed-signal networks. The nodes can be configured in bus, star or ring topologies under the control of a Pyxos Pilot. The system can be linked with the outside world using either LONworks or standard LAN/WAN protocols.

The 5- by-5-mm size of the chip allows it to be embedded into most sensor or actuator subsystems. The network operates using deterministic signaling in which every PyxosPoint is scanned every 25 ms, for an overall network speed of at least 250 Kbits/s. The protocol uses a time-division multiple access derivative that automatically retries communication on a cyclic redundancy check error.

Echelon is insuring that devices from different manufacturers will interoperate, and will self-configure across device types. Because Pyxos has a smaller topology than a building-wide LONworks environment, Echelon expects the two network types to complement each other, and that many PAN-sized Pyxos subnetworks will be connected to LONworks.

"However, we’re anticipating many Pyxos networks to use third-party networks outside the LONworks smart transceivers, so we’re not limiting the designs in any way,” Tennefoss said.

Echelon will provide its ShortStack development kit for leveraging microcontroller code, allowing its use with Pyxos just as ShortStack has been used with LONworks. Each Pyxos Pilot supports 64 ShortStack network variables, and supports 32 physical PyxosPoints.