Abstract
We here present a new PLC-POWERLINK industrial solution for Industry 4.0 applications. The proposed solution provides the capability to separate the sensing functionality from the PLC-side, in demand for the reconfigurable FPGA implementation. In particular, we here provide a framework that supports the interfacing between the POWERLINK protocol and commonly used standards, such as I2C, SPI, and UART. This has been obtained by using a framework built around a soft IP-core Application Processor, which manages the interfacing with several POWERLINK slaves, able to support the data exchange with the POWERLINK Communication Processor. A practical application example and related implementation details are presented in the paper.
Highlights
Industrial automation plays a very important role and it is constantly evolving: Industry4.0 is a demonstration of that
Our contributions in this paper focus on the development of a framework, named Slave Powerlink on Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) (SPOF) that targets industrial control systems interconnected with POWERLINK fieldbus and that supports on the three points above indicated
In the SPOF framework, the final system resulting from the design flow aims to satisfy the typical requirements that exist in an upgrade of equipment in industrial control systems, i.e., (a) to interface old platforms with a different system bus, (b) to interface to one or multiple industrial fieldbuses and (c) to perform some pre-processing on data, such as application of data fusion algorithms
Summary
Industrial automation plays a very important role and it is constantly evolving: Industry. The coexistence of multiple communication protocols is either provided in software or with a protocol redundancy (i.e., implementation of a variety of communication protocol stacks to make the device compatible with multiple protocols): the former can be unable to meet the real-time needs required by high-speed industrial protocols, while the latter drives to an increase of the costs and occupied area when the number of the protocols grows For these reasons, in recent years, with the development of programmable devices, reconfigurable hardware technology has been considered to solve the problem of smart interfacing [14,15,16].
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