TTTech Industrial end-of-year review 2021

Season’s Greetings: Let’s reach for the stars

At TTTech, we commemorate each holiday season with a donation to a charitable organization and a public holiday campaign. This year, we are once again supporting CoderDojo – a global network of free volunteer-led coding clubs in over 114 countries where young people learn to create with code. Click to view our virtual holiday card.

TTTech Industrial in 2021: Expansion of business with a strong focus on Industry 4.0 and smart manufacturing use cases

In 2021, TTTech Industrial founded a US subsidiary in Silicon Valley and acquired technology and strategic customers from pioneering fog/edge computing start-up Nebbiolo Technologies. This allowed it to widen the scope of its activities to new industries such as energy, oil/gas, and auto manufacturing and to expand its commercial operations in North America.

“The launch of our US subsidiary marks a significant step for our company. Our location in Silicon Valley brings us closer to customers and allows us to tap into a pool of the world’s best software engineering talent,” explains Thomas Berndorfer, Member of the Executive Board, TTTech Industrial.

A strong focus was placed on expanding the offering for Industry 4.0 use cases with TTTech Industrial’s edge computing platform Nerve:

• TTTech Industrial introduced a modular offering for Nerve. Feature sets were combined into four Nerve modules that support use cases such as condition monitoring, remote services, machine learning, and digital twin. They can be licensed individually or in combination, depending on the customers’ use case. The modules extend the base features of Nerve that provide a secure foundation for managing software, data, and devices at the edge. With the modular offering, customers can find the best fit for their needs and budget, so they can start small, adapt to changes in applications, and scale their solutions.
• Nerve is an open and flexible solution that includes pre-installed third-party applications, such as Crosser’s edge analytics software for powerful streaming analytics and also provides improved hard real-time virtualization thanks to the combination of the latest version of the ACRN™ hypervisor and Intel^® TCC.
• The release of Nerve version 2.3 offered new features and improvements on existing functionality to provide users with the best possible user experience.

TTTech Industrial’s Slate products provide comprehensive TSN solutions. This year, TTTech Industrial released its next generation graphical planning tool for TSN capable network devices, Slate XNS 2.0. Planning includes not only the calculation of a network schedule but also the generation of a complete configuration for each device within the network. This covers e.g. path, redundancy, and timing planning in an end-to-end fashion respecting individual device limitations. The release of Slate CNS 1.0 also makes these functionalities available as library for integration into customer network configuration tools keeping their look and feel for better market acceptance.

TTTech Industrial also released a series of technical articles, whitepapers, and case studies that highlight its industrial automation expertise and customer projects for smart manufacturing and IIoT use cases:

• In a technical article for Industrial Ethernet Book, TTTech Industrial talked about the experiences of component suppliers and system integrators with the integration and evaluation of OPC UA over TSN, mainly in controller-to-controller or machine-to-machine use cases.
• In a whitepaper titled “Nerve for real-time virtualization of control”, TTTech Industrial shared the results of a series of tests demonstrating that the ACRN™ hypervisor on Nerve provides a stable platform for running real-time tasks in a virtualized environment.
• A technical article for SPS Magazin (in German) detailed how machine builder Felss uses Nerve for flexible and resource-efficient processes, focusing on Felss’ current project for tool wear detection at an early stage.
• The changes in working due to the pandemic have made remote access an important capability for industrial automation equipment. In a technical article for Industrial Ethernet Book, TTTech Industrial reviewed use cases and methods for secure remote access for industrial assets and discussed their benefits, restrictions, and related security aspects.
• A case study with IT company craftworks highlighted a machine learning use case, where Nerve provides the technological base that craftworks’ AI models can be deployed to and are executed from.

2021 also saw some milestones in TTTech Industrial’s cooperation with its partners Microsoft and Intel:

TTTech Industrial and Microsoft have been working together since 2019. Their customer-supplier relationship has developed into a partnership over time and TTTech Industrial launched its edge computing platform Nerve on the Microsoft Azure Marketplace as part of Microsoft’s Partner Program.

In a case study, the companies show how the combination of Nerve with Azure provides an out-of-the-box solution for an edge-to-cloud infrastructure for manufacturing companies and machine builders. TTTech Industrial and Microsoft also held a joint virtual demonstration of a digital twin application example for industrial use cases.

TTTech Industrial and Intel continued working together on the ACRN™ project and the integration of ACRN™ into Nerve (see above).

Find out more about the activities of the TTTech Group in 2021.