RTP Corporation: 40 Years of Technological Excellence
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With a solid foundation of field-proven, high-performance, and high-reliable I/O hardware, RTP decided, in 1995, to expand its product offering, and added control software and a control processor to its I/O front-end subsystems and introduced the RTP 2000 Hybrid Control System. In 2002, the company made a strategic decision to enter the safety market. The decision was not to develop just another safety system at the time but to have a leading edge system and so the following objectives were set. These objectives were that RTP would develop an architecture that had to have the highest speed, had to have the highest availability and had to have the highest integrity, and at the same time it had to be designed to be compliant with IEC 61508. This last objective should not be an add-on after the system was there, but designed from the beginning with this compliance as a must objective. In 2003, the company introduced the 2300, the Single, Dual and TMR DCS versions of the system. Six hundred systems have shipped since its introduction. In October 2006, RTP received SIL-3 certification from TÜV for the 2500 Dual and TMR SIS versions of the system, and SIL-2 for the singleton version of the system. Availability calculations concluded that the 2500 achieves availability of 99.9999% (6nines). RTP believes it met or exceeded all of the objectives set for the system:
RTP's customers are pleased with its product direction and agree that the objectives have been met. RTP's product direction will continue to be formed by being a technology-directed, market-driven (by listening to our customers, understanding core technologies, and tracking industry trends) company in the nuclear, Process Control, and Safety markets. |
Founded in 1968, RTP began operations as a division of Computer Products, Inc., and in July of 1997, RTP Corp. became a privately held company. For its first twenty-seven years in business, RTP provided high-performance data acquisition systems to the worldwide nuclear market and I/O front-end subsystems for minicomputer driven data acquisition and control systems at some of the world's largest industrial companies. These process control applications were typically characterized as being located in harsh environments, yet with demanding requirements to provide accurate analog measurements under extreme environmental and EMF/RFI conditions.