Do current technology trends enforce a paradigm shift in the industrial automation market?

The advances of the semiconductor industry enable the implementation of complete computer systems on a single silicon die and the integration of MEMS sensors, signal conditioning logic and network access into a smart sensor node. The consequences of these trends, both technical and economical, lead to qualitative changes in the environment of the system engineer. In the future, system development will be concerned on one hand with the design and test of robust COTS subsystems and on the other hand with the constructive integration of these COTS subsystems into larger application systems. In such a changed world the precise specification of the interfaces between the subsystems, both in the value domain and temporal domain, is of utmost importance. It is argued that the precise temporal specification of subsystem interfaces is only possible in time-triggered architectures. This is the reason why a paradigm shift from today's dominating event-triggered real-time architectures to time-triggered real-time architectures is anticipated.