Since the advent of Industry 4.0, global industries have evolved along the route of “Internet of Things” + “Smart Manufacturing”. Traditional industrial control products are breaking free from past architectural constraints, shifting towards more interconnected, digital, intelligent, and integrated solutions, especially embedded industrial control products.
Market fluctuations have led to an overall economic downturn, but the industrial control and connectivity fields have shown remarkable resilience, becoming one of the few industries still experiencing growth alongside the automotive and energy storage markets. Industrial automation enhances labor efficiency and reduces labor costs, perfectly aligning with the industry’s expectations for cost reduction and efficiency improvement.
Take the display panel industry as an example. Although the sales of consumer panels are clearly declining, the demand for human-machine interaction panels combined with industrial control has not been significantly affected. Moreover, embedded industrial control products can provide standardized overall solutions while offering customization freedom to clients, effectively meeting and enhancing the incremental demand of the entire industrial internet.
Breaking Tradition: Accelerating Smart Upgrades with Overall Solutions
As early as 2015, the national strategic document “Made in China 2025” has already pointed out the development direction for industrial control systems, which is intelligence, networking, and digitization.Embedded products like industrial core boards and industrial control boards, while complying with the direction of intelligent development, can be more easily developed into a new generation of industry-wide solutions due to their standard packaging and industrial bus interfaces, along with support for common intelligent operating systems like Linux and Android, thus shortening this process.
Meanwhile, today’s application vendors not only need to provide industrial control hardware devices but also prepare corresponding software and hardware supporting products to offer overall solutions, allowing customers to enjoy the convenience brought by direct application and rapid market promotion of products. Therefore, embedded industrial control products, including core boards and integrated boards, have already broken through traditional boundaries, expanding coverage from the energy industry to medical, catering, and retail sectors, contributing to the Internet of Everything and industrial intelligence.
In the process of popularizing overall industrial control solutions, to comply with the current trend of “intelligence”, related manufacturers are also increasing various software-level product services, such as industry application solutions based on industrial computers combined with cloud computing, storage, and big data mining and management. As a one-stop partner in the Internet of Things, Lierda provides one-stop solutions for customers, accelerating their product launch efficiency with its excellent IC value-added distribution and supply chain, strong software and hardware development, stable cloud platform services, and advanced manufacturing capabilities.
Glimpse into Diverse Product Layouts
Take the well-known commercial catering equipment supplier, Huitete, for example. Huitete is a globally renowned supplier of commercial catering equipment, and Lierda provides industrial HMI solutions for its commercial coffee machine brand, Crem.These commercial products often have higher requirements for human-machine interaction and product performance. Compared to consumer products, they have stricter standards in functionality, operational smoothness, usage cycle, and lifespan.Additionally, due to the need for continuous iteration of their products, they must maintain a good cost-performance ratio while also having good expandability, which is the main reason Huitete chooses Lierda’s solutions.
Huitete is an international catering equipment manufacturer with over 20 sub-brands, launching numerous commercial ovens and beverage machines, such as Convotherm, Merryche, Frymaster, Servend, etc. It is understood that Huitete and Lierda are planning to adopt Lierda’s industrial core boards and industrial control boards on more commercial catering equipment to achieve product iteration upgrades, which fully demonstrates the rich diversity, ease of use, and expandability of Lierda’s industrial control products, further enhancing customer cooperation stickiness and overall industry competitiveness.
In terms of IoT connectivity capabilities, Lierda can provide RF, LoRa, BT, Wi-Fi, Wi-SUN, NB, Cat.1, 5G, and other standard communication module service capabilities. To accelerate industrial and related industry applications, it can also provide terminals such as DTU, gateways, and CPE based on various standards; Huitete also benefits from Lierda’s high-quality and diverse IoT product and solution capabilities, allowing its products to quickly achieve IoT capabilities flexibly through Wi-Fi, BT, or 4G, according to different national and regional business needs.
In addition to industrial HMI and IoT connectivity capabilities, Lierda also provides cloud platform software operation and maintenance services for Huitete’s commercial coffee machines. After accessing the IoT cloud platform, tasks can be completed through cloud control commands, programs can be iterated through remote upgrades, and various consumable situations during the use of the coffee machine can be monitored in real-time, thus achieving intelligent and refined operation of the coffee machine. Importantly, in this process, product customization is controlled by the partners themselves.
Faced with the growing demand for intelligent devices, Lierda quickly sensed the opportunity and completed a one-stop product layout on the industrial control product line, providing various product forms centered on embedded processors, such as industrial core boards, integrated boards, and industrial computers, covering mainstream platforms like TI, ST, NXP, RK, etc. Currently, Lierda’s solutions are widely used in industries such as industrial, medical, and energy storage, and are already commercially used at scale in medical devices (such as ventilators, monitors, etc.), smart vending machines, photovoltaic/storage inverters, and charging piles from leading market players.
From the perspective of the industrial control product lineup, Lierda has already launched industrial core boards such as IC300, IC500, and IC510, which are based on M7, A7, and A8 cores, respectively, and have been segmented in terms of expandability, power consumption, computing performance, and security to meet different product development needs of customers.
Among them, IC500 is the star product in Lierda’s core board series, with a maximum clock speed of 800MHz and an integrated LCD controller, supporting various interfaces such as DVP, eCSPI, CAN, UART, ADC, SPI, I2C. For industrial scenarios with various complex protocols, its meticulously crafted design ensures stability and provides multiple interfaces to guarantee peripheral expandability.
To pursue faster TTM, Lierda also has corresponding integrated board solutions.The IM600 integrated board is stable and reliable, suitable for common industrial scenarios. The IM800 4G integrated board comes with communication functions such as 4G, Wi-Fi, and GPS, suitable for scenarios requiring full functionality and strong communication industrial motherboards, such as smart delivery cabinets. Compared to industrial core boards, integrated boards are easier to develop, allowing for direct reliability assessments, thus speeding up mass production processes. Core boards excel in flexibility and wide application, offering more space for interface expandability and peripheral resources.
In a time when everyone is increasingly cautious about supply chain relationships, Lierda has opened 10 intelligent production lines in its 5G future factory to ensure that customers are not affected by supply chain issues that could delay product launch cycles, achieving a monthly production capacity of over 956 million components. Such stable and high-quality production capacity is undoubtedly sufficient to dispel any concerns about supply.
Looking at the entire industrial control market, it is not difficult to see that this type of overall solution has become an industry trend, which is also Lierda’s main focus.From Lierda’s group structure, it can also be seen that this is a company that has already fully covered the Internet of Things field, providing comprehensive solutions including communication and control, such as IoT communication modules, industrial control boards, and cloud platforms.Moreover, Lierda has been laying out 5G terminal products since 2019, which has given them a first-mover advantage in 5G industrial control products.
In addition to achieving the reliability and stability essential for industrial IoT, how to break through in “intelligence” has become a new foothold in the industrial control market. Just from the case of Huitete’s coffee machines, we can glimpse Lierda’s organic combination of its industrial control boards, IoT connectivity capabilities, and cloud platform solutions. Under Lierda’s current product and solution layout, such overall solutions have been widely applied in catering equipment, medical devices, and photovoltaic/storage, and also have opportunities for implementation in more scenarios.
