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New Gigabyte Industrial Ethernet Open Protocol - CC-Link IE
New Gigabyte Industrial Ethernet Open Protocol - CC-Link IE
By Bill Lydon - Editor
The CC-Link Partner Association (CLPA) announced the release of the open architecture gigabit (GB) CC-Link IE Field Network. I recently met with two members of CLPA Americas to get an update on the latest CC-Link IE standard. Chuck Lukasik is the Director of CLPA Americas and John Woznaik is their Network Specialist. CLPA Americas is based in Vernon Hills, Illinois.
Lukasik explained that the CC-Link Partner Association is made up of partner manufacturers who develop CC-Link products, similar to ODVA and PTO. CC-Link was the first open standard introduced by CLPA in 2000, when it was made open by Mitsubishi Electric. Approximately seven million CC-Link compatible products are manufactured and installed by hundreds of automation equipment suppliers. Currently, there are more than 1,200 CLPA members - 60% of them outside of Japan.
The original CC-Link is a high-speed RS-485 field network with a communication speed of 10 Mbps. CC-Link has international standards approval by ISO and Chinese National Standard.
Additions to the CC-Link architecture are CC-Link/LT, CC-Link Safety and now CC-Link IE. CC-Link IE comes in two versions, namely CC-Link IE Controller Network and CC-Link IE Field.
I asked Lukasik why there should be an interest in another industrial Ethernet standard. He responded with a number of reasons including the ease of application setup without the need of any IT knowledge, and the network is designed for deterministic industrial control based on token passing. Determinism is provided without the need for any Ethernet switches. All of the CC-Link networks, including RS-485, Cat5E, and fiber, are deterministic token passing architectures and use the same addressing scheme for compatibility between networks.
The CC-Link IE Controller network communicates at 1 Gbps over dual loop 802.3z multimode fiber optic cable. CC-Link IE Field network integrates data from field devices connected to CC-Link and is an 802.3ab (1000Base-T), 1 Gbps protocol using standard Cat5E cable and RJ-45 connector.
Worldwide Standard
Lukasik said that CC-link has an installed base of more than 7 million nodes with less than 50% of them being Mitsubishi products. There are over 1,000 CC-Link products on the market today. Lukasik claimed that CC-Link is the strongest industrial networking standard in Asia and cited a recent IMS Research (www.imsresearch.com) study that declares CC-Link the most used industrial network in Asia.
CC-Link Characteristics
CC-Link IE is designed for industrial control applications, although with a special Ethernet Gateway, it can connect with existing IT networks. The CC-Link organizations view this as the correct approach for industrial automation and control applications defining a separation between IT and industrial automation.
A significant difference between CC-Link IE Field Network and other Industrial Ethernet solutions is that CC-Link IE delivers deterministic control because of its deterministic token passing design, without requiring Ethernet switches. CC-Link IE uses deterministic distributed shared memory token-based communications architecture.
A simplistic way to describe the architecture is that the data tables for all connected devices are part of a shared virtual memory and there is a time cycle (token-based) for a node to read information from other nodes and write information from their node into this shared memory.
There is direct compatibility from CC-Link to CC-Link IE. The network is plug-n-play and requires no Ethernet setup knowledge.
Lukasik believes CC-Link IE has extremely low cyber security risk since it is not standard Ethernet.
Thoughts & Observations
CC-Link is a fundamental token architecture with guaranteed determinism. The latest CC-Link IE builds on this and is implemented with Ethernet “plumbing” but not the “standard” IT-world Ethernet architecture. The logic of this approach fits with those that believe the industrial control and automation network should not be directly part of the standard IT Ethernet structure in a plant, primarily to insure performance and security.
The CC-Link architecture is a data table oriented protocol as opposed to an object oriented protocol, which makes it simpler. There are tradeoffs with both protocols that should be considered based on each engineer’s philosophy and experience.
More information at: www.cclinkamerica.org