The WirelessHART community has been collectively rubbing its hands with glee for the last couple of years at the prospect of being able to release the “stranded” capabilities of all those HART transmitters, reckoned to number some 20 million, which are installed across the world’s process plants in systems whose hosts currently have no HART capability. However, to Harry Sim, the former NASA shuttle payload director whom readers last met as global vice-president of marketing for Honeywell IPS, 20 million seems a relatively paltry number. He’s got his sights set on an order of magnitude larger population of process measurement devices whose only interaction with the outside world is currently via a technician’s clip board.

Cypress Systems Corp., a subsidiary of Cypress Semiconductor Corp., introduced non-invasive wireless gauge reading solutions to reduce costs and improve efficiency in manufacturing and processing plants.  The patent-pending Wireless Gauge Reader simply clips on to the front face of an existing gauge in minutes, at less than half the cost of alternative systems.

Formerly, vice president of marketing at Honeywell Process Solutions, Harry Sim got what I called then a "sweetheart deal" to become CEO of Cypress Systems, a subsidiary of Cypress Semiconductor-- one of the leading semiconductor manufacturers in the world. Cypress has a whole potload of intellectual property, and Harry decided to look around and see what he could do with it.