As computer technology changes continue to speed up, the computer bus technologies are also changing with each passing day. Since 1981, IBM PC introduced 8-bit ISA bus technology, with maximum throughput 8 MB/s and 98-pin pinout connector. The 32-bit PCI bus technology was introduced by PCI Special Interest Group in 1992, with maximum throughput 132 MB/s and 124-pin pinout connector. The computer bus technology was evolved to a new generation high-speed serial computer expansion bus standard – PCI Express 1.0 (officially abbreviated as PCIe or PCI-E) until 2013, which has simpler communication interface (with only 36 pins for X1 lane width slot, and 164 pins for X16 lane width slot) and higher data transfer throughput (500MB/s for bidirectional X1 lane width, and 8GB/s for bidirectional X16 lane width). Under the latest PCI Express 5.0 standard, the maximum throughput of bidirectional X16 lane width has been increased to 63GB/s. Compared to the traditional PCI interface, the PCIe peripheral products can support higher data transfer throughput under low pin count slot interface. That is why new computers don’t support built-in PCI slots any more now. The great leap forward in computer bus technology has become a powerful cornerstone of various computer peripheral technology innovations.

No matter desktop computers, portable computers, industrial computers, or ubiquitous smart network devices around life, they all need to support either wired or wireless network connection in order to support network access or remote control/monitor functionalities. Compared to wireless network connection, the wired network connection can provide more stable and faster network communication capabilities. Therefore, the main network interfaces for desktop computers, industrial computers and smart network devices in fixed locations are still used wired Ethernet connections.

Since Apple introduced the world’s thinnest notebook, MacBook Air in 2008, most of new laptops emphasized thin and light, and only support Wi-Fi interface for network connection. However, the Wi-Fi connection might be slow and unstable in some network environments. To improve this issue, users can easily install a USB Ethernet dongle or USB docking station on laptops to get a stable and fast wired network connection.

EtherCAT (Ethernet for Control Automation Technology) is an open hard-real-time industrial Ethernet technology standard, originally developed by Beckhoff Automation. The EtherCAT Technology Group (ETG) was founded in 2003 and has quickly grown into the world's largest industrial Ethernet and fieldbus organization. EtherCAT technology uses unique "Processing on the fly" data exchange mechanism to realize hard-real-time and deterministic industrial communications over Ethernet. The main advantages of EtherCAT technology are very short cycle times (≤ 100 µs), very low jitter for accurate synchronization (≤ 1 µs), flexible network topologies (linear, tree, star and daisy-chain) and low hardware costs, etc.

For ideal Industry 4.0 smart manufacturing ecosystems, the smart factory cloud server should be able to collect and analyze all ecosystem information, such as engineering design sub-system, factory manufacturing sub-system, stocks and supply chain sub-system, etc. so manufacturers can maintain the engineering design, factory manufacturing, stocks and supply chains, etc. resources based the real customer demands more efficiently. To reach these requirements, manufacturers need converge the non-real-time IT (Information Technology) networks and real-time OT (Operation Technology) networks into a single network. It is hard for the traditional industrial Ethernet solutions, but the new generation industrial Ethernet, Time Sensitive Networking (TSN) technology can easily converge the IT and OT networks with real-time, deterministic, security communications.