Overview

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This course can also be taken for academic credit as ECEA 5385, part of CU Boulder’s Master of Science in Electrical Engineering degree.

Developing tomorrow's industrial infrastructure is a significant challenge. This course goes beyond the hype of consumer IoT to emphasize a much greater space for potential embedded system applications and growth: The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), also known as Industry 4.0. Cisco’s CEO stated: “IoT overall is a $19 Trillion market. IIoT is a significant subset including digital oilfield, advanced manufacturing, power grid automation, and smart cities”.

This is part 1 of the specialization. The primary objective of this specialization is to closely examine emerging markets, technology trends, applications and skills required by engineering students, or working engineers, exploring career opportunities in the IIoT space. The structure of the course is intentionally wide and shallow: We will cover many topics, but will not go extremely deep into any one topic area, thereby providing a broad overview of the immense landscape of IIoT. There is one exception: We will study security in some depth as this is the most important topic for all "Internet of Things" product development.

In this course students will learn :
* What Industry 4.0 is and what factors have enabled the IIoT
* Key skills to develop to be employed in the IIoT space
* What platforms are, and also market information on Software and Services
* What the top application areas are (examples include manufacturing and oil & gas)
* What the top operating systems are that are used in IIoT deployments
* About networking and wireless communication protocols used in IIoT deployments
* About computer security; encryption techniques and secure methods for insuring data integrity and authentication

Syllabus

Market Overview, Key Skills to Develop

In this module you will see a specialization (all 3 courses) overview, learn what Industry 4.0 is all about, learn about the enabling factors that made it possible for the IIoT to come into existence, and become aware of what key skills to learn in order to be employed in the IIoT market segment.

Platforms, Software and Services

In this module we will take a look at what a platform is and the leading suppliers of platforms. I'll give you a quick look at an example building automation deployment and how a platform forms the "glue" that ties the entire system together. We will also take a look at the software and services market.

Top 5 application areas, Realtime Operating Systems

In this module we will look at the top 5 application areas and considerations involved in selecting a real-time operating system for an IIoT node (think: a single board computer attached to a manufacturing machine like a lathe).

Networking, wireless communication providers and protocols

In this module we look at networking concepts and two important developments: Network Functions Virtualization and Software Defined Networks. We then move on to take a quick survey of long-range and short-range wireless protocols.

Security

This is probably the most important module in the entire specialization. With billions of devices connected to the internet, security is of paramount importance. I will share with you the bulk of my experience in developing security solutions for end-node type devices. For me the products were hard drives and solid state drives. However, the principles that "work" for storage devices also apply to any IIoT device. I have a colleague guest speaker (Don Matthews) come in to talk to you about his experience with security which he has been doing for 25+ years.