APAX-5000 Series PACs from Industrial Automation Group, Advantech Corp., Cincinnati, OH, integrate control, information processing, and networking into a single control system with a dual-controller architecture. Two stand-alone CPU modules work together; one provides high computing power for HMI/SCADA, recipe, database, and communication tasks while the other is dedicated to SoftLogic I/O tasks. Both controllers support backup functions. The same I/O processing program can be stored on the two controllers allowing one to execute I/O processing and the other to automatically take responsibility, within 1.5 s, should the first controller fail. The I/O modules can be used as either local or remote I/O through their Ethernet bus backplane.