Analogic Corporation has entered into an agreement to acquire privately held Copley Controls Corporation of Canton, Massachusetts, a leading supplier of gradient amplifiers for Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), and precision motion control systems. The purchase price is approximately $68.75 million cash and up to an additional $1.8 million to reimburse Copley shareholders for the tax consequences of the transaction. Copley will become a wholly owned subsidiary of Analogic. The transaction is expected to close in early April 2008.

According to the latest statistics from IMS Research, the worldwide low voltage AC & DC motor drives market experienced unprecedented growth in 2006. Record high energy prices combined with improved awareness of the energy saving benefits of motor drives have contributed to increasing the market by nearly 15% over 2005 levels, to more than $7.6 billion. It is expected to continue growing by an average of 9% per year in terms of revenues to surpass $11.2 billion by 2011.

A compact new direct drive linear motor combines a slim form factor with high speed and 25g acceleration. Copley Motion Systems say that their STB11 motors provide ten times the speed and ten times the life of ballscrew based actuators making them ideal for boosting productivity in high speed point-to-point positioning applications.

The £47 million a year UK market for high performance machinery drives is to be tackled by a new team at ABB. The market represents 37% of the total UK AC variable speed drives sales and is one that, until now, ABB has not participated in.

“ABB is entering the world of high performance servo drives for the first time,” comments Steve Ruddell, general manager, drives and motors. “This is the fastest growing sector of the variable speed drives market and our plan is to take 10% market share by the end of 2010.”

Baldor has added program debugging facilities to its Mint language for motion and machine automation. The company's Windows-based Mint WorkBench toolsuite now include breakpoints, single-step program execution and virtual hardware, providing sophisticated tools for dealing with the growing complexity of machine design.

"Machine design is tending to become more complex with many axes, sophisticated HMIs, software configurability and factory integration issues," notes Mark Crocker of Baldor. "These new debug resources in Mint WorkBench can dramatically reduce development timescales."

The new debug tools include execution break points, single-step (or 'step into' subroutines or functions) program execution, execute to cursor position, and sophisticated watch facilities that will track the value of variables, etc.

Another valuable resource is a 'hover over' feature. This allows engineers to see how a variable or task is declared, or the value of a variable while the program is running, simply by positioning the cursor on a program line. You can also jump to the defintion of any variable, sub-routine or task via a context-sensitive, right-click menu.

Code may also be executed without connection to hardware, giving engineers the means to start developing and test software before the hardware is ready. A new 'virtual motion controller' facility allows users to run the code as it would on most of Baldor's NextMove family of motion controllers, which includes PCIbus cards, standalone controllers, and Ethernet Powerlink compatible systems.

"The simplicity and ease of programming is increasingly a critical factor in automation project success," adds Crocker. "These new debugging resources, combined with the rich range of development tools in Mint Workbench, provide automation engineers with the same kind of sophisticated facilities that you can see on PC languages - providing a tangible breakthrough in productivity that can dramatically reduce machinery project timescales and cost."

The Mint language has been developed over nearly 20 years and today offers a high-productivity development environment for automation applications. Its use of high-level English like commands simplifies program writing and comprehension. These commands include probably the richest motion control programming facilities available worldwide, with 'keywords' that effectively provide templates or 'canned' software functions for common motion/movement related functions. The incredible range of Mint's motion control functions compared with ?open? industry software - greatly simplifies complex machine design projects. The software also comes with its own license-free multi-tasking operating system, and free Active X components for easy connectivity with PCs.

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