Industry 4.0 has been with us for a while now and has evolved in many different directions. But the underlying factor is that we’re making our factories smarter, a proposition in which everyone wins. With each new announcement, those smarts grow a little more. Now, intelligence at the Edge is a hot topic, as that lets some of these manufacturing systems make decisions on their own, or immediately report back to an operator.

To that end, Maxim Integrated Products has developed a product aimed at programmable logic controllers (PLCs). Its Go-IO reference design packs 20 configurable IOs into a space that’s about one-third the size of a credit card, yet contains the processing power needed to enable productivity-enhancing self-diagnostic capabilities in automated factory subsystems. This is the power of the Industrial IoT (IIoT).

Go-IO helps move the intelligence closer to the Edge, enabling active monitoring and communication of equipment health and status, as well as higher throughput and productivity. The reference design also meets increasingly stringent size and power requirements of PLCs, providing a smaller solution that consumes less power than previous offerings. This makes it well suited for industrial automation, building automation, and industrial robotics applications.

The reference design is configured with the following components:

• the MAX14819, a low-power, dual-channel transceiver
• the MAX22192, an eight-channel octal digital input with isolated SPI interface
• the MAX14912, an eight-channel digital output driver
• the MAXM22511, an integrated 2.5-Kvrms isolated power and digital isolated RS485 transceiver module
• the MAX14483 six-channel, 3.75-kV_RMS galvanic low-power digital isolator or the MAX14130 four-channel 1-KV_RMS, galvanic digital isolator
• and the MAXM15462 voltage regulator ICs and power modules

The Go-IO module, also known as MAXREFDES212, is available for $495.