Fire Control Instruments' Fire Alarm System Has Full-Network Control and Communications Using ADSP-21xx

911 - Prevention, Detection and Saving Lives
On September 11, 2001 imagine if every person in the World Trade Center had heard specific instructions of what was happening and knew exactly what to do. How many lives could have been saved? Unfortunately, we will never know. But we will let the impact of real life events mobilize and motivate us to push technology to the limits to prevent future disasters from happening. That is exactly what Fire Control Instruments, a division of the HFSG (Honeywell Fire Solutions Group) is doing to improve lifestyles and save lives. FCI makes emergency communications systems and fire alarm systems that combine technology, flexibility, survivability and reliability.

Pushing Technology to the Limits
The FCI engineering team has dedicated their careers to the continuous course of making their products more effective yet more affordable so that home owners, companies, government agencies and educational facilities will be motivated to make the changes necessary to make all buildings safer places to live and work. A s a design team, they pride themselves as innovators, not only as leaders in technological advancement but in keeping themselves way out in front of the pack with a "leapfrog" approach to the industry. Mario Casamassima, FCI's Vice President of Engineering, was determined to deliver new safety innovations across existing platforms to preserve and leverage the investments customers and prospects had already made and also pave a path for future technology advances.

Two Wires and a Hundred Stories
The challenge for Mario's team was to create the first fire alarm system to deliver full-network control and communications, digital messaging, live voice instructions and fire fighter telephone communications through a distributed network – all on a single pair of wires. This required partnering with technology experts who could help them accomplish this feat. Their choice of Analog Devices DSPs came from thorough considerations and comparisons. When asked what the key reasons for selecting ADI and the ADSP-21XX products, Casamassima explained, "We needed to feel confident that the products we chose would continue to be supported for a long time and we felt 100% confident that Analog Devices would give us the reliability and consistency we need to stay far ahead of our competitors."

Award-Winning Technology Team
Working together, ADI and FCI produced the award-winning Netsolo Broadband platform. This voice-over LAN engineering breakthrough, using Analog Devices DSPs, voice compression algorithms, and a fault-tolerant network architecture, was recently awarded the highly-coveted Honeywell "Automation and Control Solutions Technical Achievement Award" for product development. When asked about the future vision of his team, Casamassima added, "Because of the reliability factors, consistency of tools, as well as the transportability of code within the ADI product families, we will look to the ADI Blackfin products to keep our lead in the industry going forward."

For more information about Fire Control Instruments, please visit www.firecontrolinstruments.com.