ServoWire is low cost ...

Lower initial purchase price, lower interface costs and lower total installed cost.

Make no mistake about it, ServoWire® is also about lower cost.

While IEEE-1394 offers superlative performance and specific features for real-time control, its most significant benefit may be its price tag. The technology has been targeted for a wide variety of consumer electronic products and PCs, and has been driven by design goals to provide a low cost solution.

Utilized as a servodrive interface, 1394 delivers both simplicity and low cost with its thin serial interface cables. Consequently, ServoWire® drive interface costs are less than the traditional analog interface. Another lure of digitally networked drives is the speed and simplicity of wiring, with the resulting reduction in total installed cost.

In the past few years, servodrive prices have been consistently dropping --- with the industry-wide move to more highly integrated power block technology and compact electronic design. Surface mount technology and powerful digital signal processors (DSPs) have allowed industrial servodrives to provide greater value to customers.

We expect this trend to continue and the market should expect greater installation simplicity and lower installed costs for motion control systems. The advantages of networked servodrive technology is so great that prices for a typical ServoWire® system will be reduced more than 25%, compared to the existing ORION solution.

This technology, as well with other open standards, will allow us to further reduce average system prices 10-15% per year over the next five years. Because of this change in the value proposition for customers, we believe that multi-axis servo control will make inroads against other motion control technologies at an increasing rate. Servodrive technology is an area ripe for innovation, with more sophisticated levels of technology and software delivered at significantly reduced complexity and lower cost.

IEEE-1394 is an exciting technology, and promises to provide a platform for continuing innovation in digital drives and motion control systems in general. Combined with increasing power in the industrial PC and the emergence of Ethernet and TCP/IP as the basis of factory networking connectivity, IEEE-1394 provides a bright future and a basis for continuing, cost-effective improvements in manufacturing productivity.