Articles and News

The comprehensive guide is now available for designers, integrators and installers.

With Single-Pair Ethernet (SPE) creating opportunities for Operational Technology (OT) network innovation, Ethernet Alliance seeks to tap into building- and industrial-automation expertise.

CLPA established a global strategic advisor role, which will accelerate the construction of Smart Factories by increasing the reach of CC-Link IE TSN.

Microchip’s LAN8770 is an IEEE® 802.3bw-compliant 100BASE-T1 PHY in a 5 x 5 mm package for space-constrained automotive applications.

Learn from an interview with Jouni Aro of Prosys OPC how developers and end users alike can get started using OPC UA. Jouni shares information about off-the-shelf products, software development toolkits, open source options, training and support, as well as product certification.

OPC Days 2020, a virtual event held June 22- 25, provided the latest information about OPC UA (Open Platform Communications United Architecture), the protocol-agnostic framework for the Industrial Internet of Things and Industry 4.0 initiatives.

HELUKABEL is convinced of the potential of the new transmission technology and has been involved in the SPE Industrial Partner Network since November 2019.

By Bill Lydon Open system options continue to emerge from nontraditional suppliers and standards groups, and this is a trend that I expect will accelerate and enable multivendor interoperability at all levels of the system architecture.

Both wired and wireless networks have been undergoing a significant evolution during the past decade, enabling greater opportunities to those who leverage the advancements in the next one.

By Bill Lydon The Process Automation industry has been heavily impacted by the influx of new technologies and, as we enter the next decade, several organizations are providing roadmaps in order to help process automation companies enable the best practices to leverage these technologies and drive competitiveness and productivity forward.

By Bill Lydon The impact of open manufacturing initiatives continues to be a worldwide affair. These initiatives continue to grow as industry recognizes the need to modernize and the Industry 4.0 movement (called “Industrie 4.0” in Germany, its country of origin) continues to accelerate.

OPC UA is an industrial, protocol-agnostic framework for the Industrial Internet of Things and Industrie 4.0 that contains mechanisms for secure, reliable, manufacturer and platform-independent information exchange, as well as options for semantic information modeling and self-description of devices.

This specification describes a standardized OPC UA object model for PROFINET devices which enables PROFINET devices from a wide variety of different manufacturers to transfer device data to asset management systems in a standardized way, for example. Standardization makes information collection significantly easier for tool manufacturers, regardless of the manufacturer, but this is just the beginning of PI’s vertical integration strategy.

Device libraries have been a common problem for many field communicators, and the complicated update procedure has been a nightmare for many users. Vendors sometimes struggle to understand what really happens in the field, and the chat groups on WhatsApp prove that the challenges still exist out there.

PRM centralizes management of large volumes of data from instrumentation and equipment.and fully supports communication standards such as HART, FOUNDATION fieldbus™ (FF-H1), PROFIBUS, PROFINET, ISA100 and FDT/DTM (Field Device Tool/Device Type Manager4) interface standards

The FDT ecosystem is evolving to incorporate modern web-based and mobile applications in the process, hybrid and discrete manufacturing markets.

Learn from an interview with Darek Kominek of Matrikon about the concepts of built-in security, the IT-OT gap, protecting against hacker/malware attacks, and many other features that have made OPC UA the secure data-exchange standard it is today. his is the third in the series of OPC Experts Interviews.

The FDT 3.0 standard is intended to accelerate the evolutionary journey into the Fourth Industrial Revolution by enabling an ecosystem of FDT-based solutions to meet demands for IIoT and Industrie 4.0 applications.

By James McQuiggan Ransomware is no longer a hit and run type of attack. The criminals are utilizing phishing and other social engineering techniques to gain access to the IT network and pivoting through to the OT networks to copy and exfiltrate the data. It’s only a matter of time before criminal organizations are able to gain access to more OT facilities and organizations.

Learn how the science of the open platform communication standard, OPC UA, is applied across the industrial automation sector from an interview with Uwe Steinkrauss, CEO of Unified Automation. This is the second in the series of OPC Experts Interviews.