Market development of Ethernet
Communication is a basic need of humans and by now no industries can be imagined without it.
Today, nothing works without permanent, bi-directional information exchange - neither in society nor in the industry.
We live in the middle of the communication age, and the fieldbus can be found wherever reliability matters. What makes fieldbuses so special is that the sensors as well as the actuators can be supplied (nearly) simultaneously with real-time information.
The fieldbus technology era began at the end of the 1970s and has now arrived in the Internet age. The success is based on the reliability and the cost advantages of a bus wiring. In addition, they also provided for the growing needs for diagnosis and data quantities. The considerable manufacturer independence, guaranteed by user organizations, is a further building block for the success of the different buses. This provided the impetus for the international spreading of fieldbuses.
Parallel, at the end of the 1980s the computer with its peripheral devices and the Internet were born. The rapid growth of these new possibilities quickly led to the question whether this technology could not also be used in the industry. Laptop, USB, plug and play, Ethernet, e-mail, data storage - all this created desires, and the first approaches appeared.
This was driven by two factors: the rapidly growing data volumes and number of participants by increasingly intelligent sensors, actuators, HMI and controls as well as the desire to universally keep and evaluate all information in the ERP system.
The first hurdles were the real-time behaviour and the controllability of environmental influences in the field. However, a full-duplex, collision-free transmission procedure was soon found with Fast Ethernet, which satisfies all essential requirements for automation technology.
A further advantage resulted from the different usable transmission media. Ethernet "talks" via cable, optical fiber cable, and wireless.
Lack of standardization remained the only obstacle, so that a multitude of different and incompatible systems resulted.
EtherCAT, PROFINET, SERCOS III, Ethernet/IP, and CC-LINK IE can be named. They only have levels 1 and 2 of the layer model in common. The cause was that most manufacturers leaned towards a fieldbus standard - and there were quite a few, even when DeviceNET, PROFIBUS, CANopen, and CC-Link are the main players.
Thus we still may face a second fieldbus war, even if by now there are efforts to deploy the superior TCP/IP protocol.
The market is growing rapidly and now also advances into areas which had not been addressed until now, like for example "renewable energies", home automation, and process automation.
The basic demand for (safe) communication also continues to grow.
2011 A.Mueller
