Powerlin is the wise choice of the hottest packagi

A wise choice for packaging equipment manufacturers - Powerlink communication technology

"there are two things worth considering when choosing an industrial Ethernet bus system", said Claudio Macchiavelli, director of engineering software at lapak

ilapak is a manufacturer of high-end packaging machines and supplies its products to world-famous food and beverage manufacturers and the personal hygiene industry. Their products include cookies, biscuits, coffee, sugar, tea, pasta, meat, poultry, as well as some pharmaceutical products and wipes

so far, ilapak adopts can bus. It has the advantages of openness and necessary certainty. However, when there are too many connected devices on the bus, some problems will occur due to the limitation of its bandwidth. Therefore, machine manufacturers always install two or more can buses, but this will bring some disadvantages in changing the flow of experimental machines, especially in debugging and maintenance

looking for a future reliable bus system

the limitations of CAN bus prompted Claudio Macchiavelli to start looking for a new bus system, which can meet his requirements for speed and certainty. Modern concepts are clearly focused on the industrial ether. It has numerous excellent points and a wide range of applications, ranging from the use of standard office equipment (ensuring the safety of investment), to popular topologies, such as star, ring, or tree structures, and can achieve faster communication speed. In addition to the basic transmission speed of 100m bits, the popular industrial Ethernet system on the market can also provide 1g speed

the trend of the industrial field will undoubtedly follow the trend that affects the development of the office field. Those who bet the wrong money will regret it in the near future. Therefore, the new choices brought by industrial Ethernet undoubtedly increase the confidence of any system designer. If the basic decision to use industrial ether has been made, the next question will immediately emerge: "which system is the right choice?"

system designers who take this problem into consideration will soon think that the solutions provided by different suppliers are incompatible with each other, and this ether actually has many different meanings

the problem of choosing the right industrial ether

from the perspective of machine manufacturers, the current market is relatively chaotic. Different companies compete with each other by investing a lot of capital in advertising and exaggerating the performance characteristics of products, and boast that their products are the best in the current industrial ether field. Depending on the market position of the company, the focus of publicity is on the number of products, reference performance, market penetration, or simply market dominance. Objective comparison between different systems is not the main direction of this paper, but it still needs to discuss how designers choose the right products

two key factors that must be considered

ilapak decided to use an industrial Ethernet system independent of automation suppliers. Remember the two key factors for ilapak? First: the system must be able to handle standard Ethernet components. First of all, this is very obvious. After all, ether is a part of industrial ether. However, in fact, the so-called industrial Ethernet system can only be used when ASICs chips are installed. In the choice, such a tiny factor is easy to be ignored and become a trap. Claudio Macchiavelli explains this: "Buy it and you're dead". Whoever chooses one of these bus systems will soon be dominated by an automation supplier. Now let's talk about the second factor: this must be an open system. Openness is another way to combat non privatization. It means that any component can be accessed and implemented in the existing system without the cost of license or ASI chip. Of course, there are many exemptions now Ethernet based systems that license or avoid ASIC chips can even download the source code at will, but for those who don't care much about it, this is undoubtedly a trap. Those salesmen who protect themselves are vague about the exact value of the jitter, synchronization and certainty of the system. But this is exactly what today's machine manufacturers require. However, the so-called ASIC free scheme running on standard Ethernet chips often becomes a fatigue repetition of performance loss and further worsens. Therefore, for this kind of system, only using ASIC chip can achieve the best performance

million dollar problem

when the system involves openness and is based on standard Ethernet components, this problem has become a million dollar problem without exaggeration. But after careful consideration, we can still find the answer to the problem. "Let's take a look at all relevant industrial Ethernet systems in the market today," Macchiavelli said. "Including EtherCAT, Powerlink, PROFINET RT, and sercosii, only Powerlink can meet these two key factors!"

claudio Macchiavelli spent only 6 weeks to apply the annual consumption of pow to the Linux system platform with more than 5trillion tons of erlink. "Management node" of Powerlink "It runs on the new standard Ethernet chip of cni-1. Since EPRG launched the open technology for everyone, it has become feasible to exempt ASICs and licenses. After using Powerlink, ilapak has taken a decisive step towards the future. They can choose automation components without being constrained by any single supplier. Not only that, they are very excited to choose the system with the most market penetration and the most components 。

in addition to these two critical factors for ilapak, today's Powerlink has reached the forefront. Integrated security, 1g rate, CANopen protocol, and redundancy are only a small part of its many important features. It can guarantee 100% safety investment

"maybe standard Ethernet components and openness are not very critical to you. Of course, you have the right to ignore these two factors. But it is likely that your end users will one day care about the bus system used by the machine, not just the controller of the machine." (end)