PROFIBUS slave stack available for industrial automation

20th November 2015

Renesas

Nat Bowers

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Renesas Electronics Europe and TMG TE has announced the PROFIBUS slave stack availability for the R-IN Family. The two companies have expanded their partnership to provide system solutions for Renesas’ R-IN32M3 series of industrial Ethernet communication Application Specific Standard Products (ASSPs) and RZ/T1 group of MPUs. In addition to the extensive set of industrial Ethernet protocols, an optimised PROFIBUS slave implementation is now available.

PROFIBUS is a fieldbus communication standard in industrial automation. Developed in the 1980s in Germany, PROFIBUS has become established as a leading technology. There are currently over 50m installed PROFIBUS devices in the process and manufacturing industries all over the world, a number that shows the importance of the PROFIBUS market today.

“Although industrial Ethernet technologies have the highest growth rates within industrial automation, PROFIBUS continues to grow, adding 3.5m new nodes worldwide in 2014 alone,” said Niels Trapp, Senior Director, Segment Solutions, Industrial Communications Business Group, Renesas Electronics Europe. “This shows a significant customer demand that we are addressing together with our partner TMG TE. Our goal is to support our customers by offering rich software functionality and added-value services right out of the box, which reduces our customers’ prototype development time.”

“Our cooperation with Renesas resulted in delivering leading industrial network technology to industrial automation businesses world-wide,” added Klaus-Peter Willems, Managing Director, TMG TE.

Renesas’ R-IN Engine is an integrated processor subsystem that includes both Ethernet and RTOS hardware accelerators. It was specifically developed for industrial applications, where high speed and real-time communication as well as low power consumption are some of the highest priorities. The R-IN Engine is featured in the R-IN32M3 series as well as the RZ/T1 group.

The R-IN Engine runs PROFIBUS slave on an ARM Cortex-M3 processor with enough headroom to run additional applications. The integrated RTOS (HW-RTOS) dramatically reduces the burden of the CPU and improves the interrupt response time with minimal jitter. The combination of the CPU and the HW-RTOS results in ultra-high-speed real-time responsiveness five to ten times that of a conventional software RTOS.

The R-IN Engine already supports a variety of industrial Ethernet communication standards, such as EtherCAT, CC-Link IE, EtherNet/IP, PROFINET and Modbus.