Industrial gateway bridges fieldbus, Ethernet

This gateway bridges gapes between traditional fieldbus, real-time Ethernet-based systems and other serial protocols. Up to 1,000 protocol combinations are possible in a DIN-rail mounted housing.

By Plant Engineering Staff March 23, 2009

The netTAP 100 gateway is designed to bridge the gaps between traditional fieldbus, real-time Ethernet-based systems and serial protocols. Based on the netX chip, up to 1,000 protocol combinations are possible in a modular compact DIN-rail mounted housing. The gateway is capable of linking any of the major fieldbus, real-time industrial Ethernet and serial protocols used in the market today. Master and slave protocols for CANopen, DeviceNet, PROFIBUS, CCLink, EtherCAT, Ethernet/IP, Modbus TCP, POWERLINK, PROFINET, SERCOS III, MB/RTU, MB ASCII RS-232, RS-422 and RS-485 are included for real-time I/O data exchange.

The gateway can be configured to be a master or slave on either end. The configuration software for the master side is an enhanced version of SYCON.net, which is an FDT/DTM-based tool. A standard USB port is used for configuration as well as loading network firmware and diagnostics. It also supports the use of a multi-media Flash card or SD-card for storage of configuration data, which allows configuration data to be easily duplicated or transferred to multiple gateways on a network.

Development tools are also available that allow third parties to develop custom protocol gateways using any one of our stacks and gateway applications to their own protocol. These protocols would need to be based on serial-, Ethernet-, PROFIBUS- or CAN-based interfaces.

Hilscher North America Inc.
www.hilscher.com

Also read:

High Performance Industrial Networks, original CFE Media research