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• Freescale
• Industrial Network and Field Bus Protocols

Industrial Network and Field Bus Protocols

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Overview

Customers who develop network-connected devices for industrial manufacturing, power system management, health care facilities, transportation systems, or similar applications often require reliable real-time, deterministic, operation in harsh environments.

Field bus protocols originally evolved to interconnect industrial drives, motors, actuators and controllers. These numerous field buses include PROFIBUS®, DeviceNet™, ControlNet™, CAN/CANopen, InterBus and Foundation Field Bus.

Subsequently, manufacturers created higher level networking protocols to interwork with the field bus protocols across Ethernet. These include PROFINET®, EtherNet/IP™, ETHERNET Powerlink, EtherCAT®, Modbus®-TCP and SERCOS III. Industrial consortia have now established additional protocol layers which format data to enable efficient data exchange among different pieces of equipment.

Design Challenges

Many industrial network applications share attributes, such as:

• Real-time operation to detect state changes and take appropriate actions within an acceptable timeframe.
• Deterministic operation to execute instructions in a predetermined order and at a predetermined time.
• Reliable operation, often with N+1, 2N or N+M redundancy, depending on the perceived cost of an outage.
• Secure operation to ensure that unauthorized persons cannot accidentally or intentionally access or change data and manipulate control systems.
• Safe operation to ensure the system will not harm people or nearby equipment.
• Ruggedized systems to operate in harsh environments such as:
  • -40 C to +120 C temperatures at each chip on a board.
  • Locations that are dirty, dusty or surrounded by dangerous chemicals or emissions.
  • Environments that contain high levels of electromagnetic radio emissions across a wide frequency spectrum.
  • Remote systems which are difficult to access for maintenance and repair.  These systems require designs that minimize parts with higher failurerates, such as fans, to reduce time between system-level failures.
  • Systems that are operated by people who are not necessarily technology experts, who may not have access to sophisticated diagnostic equipment and who often do not have time to read long instruction manuals or take training courses.

Solutions

Even though many of these protocols were developed to provide a technical competitive advantage for their owners, most customers no longer want to be locked into a single source vendor. Instead, they prefer flexibility and interoperability among devices from competing vendors to reduce the cost of updating and maintaining disparate platform interfaces and software branches.

Freescale and our partners collaborate to support the widest range of protocols and the inter-working among these devices, thereby encouraging increased customer adoption of open standards and the evolution of converged standards. This can also facilitate more software and hardware reuse across customer products ranging from small, low-cost examples to complex high-cost products.

Software and system partners are rapidly building an ecosystem of protocols, industry-standard hardware form factors and off-the-shelf system solutions for almost every type of industrial application that uses 32-bit programmable integrated solutions based on Freescale’s Power Architecture™ technology and ColdFire® technologies. These devices communicate well with many interfaces to support a wide range of industrial networks as well as significant software and hardware reuse across many different applications

Freescale 32-bit embedded processors are ideally suited for industrial network applications. They:

• Integrate a high performance processing unit together with controllers for Ethernet, SATA, UART, SPI, USB, displays and other interfaces in order to reduce the overall circuit board complexity, cost and power consumption
• Offer programmable flexibility to evolve with changing requirements and protocols
• Provide ever-increasing system performance from 50 to 3000+ million instructions per second (MIPS)
• Target low-power battery-operated applications ranging <1-2W
• Reduce system cost with integrated processors starting around $10 (suggested resale price for 10K units).
• Support a wide range of operating systems, including Linux® OS
• Benefit from a large ecosystem of partner tools, protocols and systems that reduce product development cost and improve time-to-market and time-in-market