The pre-certified embedded communication interfaces can be directly integrated into the electronics of the terminal device. Changes in the firmware of the terminal device are not necessary. This is important, for instance, for those devices whose firmware is certified and therefore may not be altered. As an alternative to customer’s own developed interfaces, the UNIGATE IC family optimizes developments costs and time-to-market of the final product.
The compact embedded solution is available as a core component for Industry 4.0 for all common fieldbus and Industrial Ethernet standards PROFIBUS, PROFINET, EtherNet, EtherNet/IP, EtherCAT, DeviceNET, as well as for Modbus RTU, Modbus TCP, CANopen and LonWorks. All of the devices, which are designed for various protocols, are pin-compatible and can therefore be used flexibly and can be interchanged without additional effort. This thus allows quickly providing terminal devices with any desired bus for optimal integration into the environment.
The UNIGATE IC, which consists of microcontroller, Flash, RAM and all other components such as optocoupler and bus driver, is provided in a 32 DIL housing covering an area of 25 mm x 45 mm. The embedded solution can be connected via a UART interface to the microcontroller of the terminal device or can operate as stand-alone. The hardware development is reduced to integration of the IC socket and bus specific connectors.
The powerful all-in-one bus nodes can be programmed via the Deutschmann Automation developed script language. Therefore, more complex applications, which cannot be presented via a pure configuration, can be mapped. The Protocol Developer is a free tool for generation of the script. It is easy to use and specifically optimized to the bus communication. The scripts run on all UNIGATE IC variants.
