Patents by Inventor Nicholas L. Stay

Nicholas L. Stay has filed for patents to protect the following inventions. This listing includes patent applications that are pending as well as patents that have already been granted by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO).

  • Patent number: 11927950
    Abstract: A system for communicating between redundant devices balances the desired attributes of a high availability (HA) control system and a safety control system. The system includes concurrent connections as a fault tolerant mechanism for industrial protocol connections at the transport layer. The concurrent connections establish multiple paths for redundancy from a data producer to a data consumer. Concurrent connections increase availability of the HA control and safety instrumented systems. More specifically, concurrent connections and architectural redundancies eliminate a single point of failure within the control system and further reduce safety connection timeouts during fault detection and/or recovery. Concurrent connections may be used to keep a HA system operational or to provide detection of a failure in a safety system. The industrial control network may be configured to function as a HA control system, as a safety control system, or with certain degrees of both HA and safety-related operation.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: October 29, 2021
    Date of Patent: March 12, 2024
    Assignee: Rockwell Automation Technologies, Inc.
    Inventors: Nicholas L. Stay, Anthony G. Gibart, Mark A. Flood, Chandresh R. Chaudhari, Chad J. Bohl, Sivaram Balasubramanian
  • Publication number: 20220050451
    Abstract: A system for communicating between redundant devices balances the desired attributes of a high availability (HA) control system and a safety control system. The system includes concurrent connections as a fault tolerant mechanism for industrial protocol connections at the transport layer. The concurrent connections establish multiple paths for redundancy from a data producer to a data consumer. Concurrent connections increase availability of the HA control and safety instrumented systems. More specifically, concurrent connections and architectural redundancies eliminate a single point of failure within the control system and further reduce safety connection timeouts during fault detection and/or recovery. Concurrent connections may be used to keep a HA system operational or to provide detection of a failure in a safety system. The industrial control network may be configured to function as a HA control system, as a safety control system, or with certain degrees of both HA and safety-related operation.
    Type: Application
    Filed: October 29, 2021
    Publication date: February 17, 2022
    Inventors: Nicholas L. Stay, Anthony G. Gibart, Mark A. Flood, Chandresh R. Chaudhari, Chad J. Bohl, Sivaram Balasubramanian
  • Patent number: 10585412
    Abstract: Hardware memory management units are used in an integrated safety/non-safety industrial computer to allow shared memory architecture processors to implement safety and non-safety reduced risk of memory corruption. Testing of the memory management unit of the non-safety processor may provide a periodic writing to protected memory to invoke a protection fault providing a report to the safety processor.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: February 13, 2017
    Date of Patent: March 10, 2020
    Assignee: Rockwell Automation Technologies, Inc.
    Inventors: Joseph P. Izzo, Nicholas L. Stay
  • Publication number: 20180231949
    Abstract: Hardware memory management units are used in an integrated safety/non-safety industrial computer to allow shared memory architecture processors to implement safety and non-safety reduced risk of memory corruption. Testing of the memory management unit of the non-safety processor may provide a periodic writing to protected memory to invoke a protection fault providing a report to the safety processor.
    Type: Application
    Filed: February 13, 2017
    Publication date: August 16, 2018
    Inventors: Joseph P. Izzo, Nicholas L. Stay