Sercos goes East
Sercos International took part in a total of three events in Asia in July and August. Both ION events in Japan as well as Automation in India were a complete success.
The International Open Network (ION) roadshow in Tokyo, which took place in July, saw 25% more visitors than in the previous year. The Sercos booth and a Sercos seminar that took place at the site also benefited from the increased number of visitors. The Sercos® SoftMaster demo as well as the OPC-UA demonstrator were very popular.
With a Sercos III Soft Master, a specific Sercos III FPGA or an ASIC master component is not required. Instead, a standard Ethernet controller is used and the Sercos III hardware functions are emulated in host-based driver software. With this implementation approach, adequate real-time behavior is ensured for a large number of applications. If an Ethernet controller with several queues and telegram scheduling (such as INTEL i210™) is used, even synchronicities in the area of a hardware-based master can be achieved. Due to the low manufacturing costs, the high flexibility and the high scalability, this approach is of great interest for the Asian market in particular.
The OPC-UA specification describes how the Sercos information model is mapped onto OPC-UA so that the functions and data provided by Sercos devices can be made accessible via OPC-UA on a standardized, i.e., cross-product and manufacturer basis. The aim is to facilitate data exchange between the machine periphery and superordinate IT systems and support the requirements of Industry 4.0 with respect to optimal consistency and semantic interoperability.
A further ION roadshow took place in Nagoya in August. Here, too, the Sercos technology with the new demos and the Sercos seminar found major interest.
Also in August, the most important automation trade fair in India, Automation 2016, took place in Mumbai, India. Here, too, Sercos International showed with practice-based demonstrators the possibilities that exist for a wide variety of applications in factory and process automation. In addition, as part of the first Indian IoT conference, Peter Lutz, Managing Director of Sercos International, presented a lecture on the topic “The role of industrial communication in the context of Industry 4.0.”