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Monday, July 10, 2006 |
Just received the latest ProfiNews. It takes on the myth of Profinet being "proprietary." I don't know if Carl wrote this or someone else, but he does acknowledge the source of the "proprietary" argument (well, mostly). And the source--to use ProfiNet, developers must buy custom ASICS. The protocols on the wire are open TCP/IP and their cousins, but the chips are not commercial off the shelf. I assume (and someone will correct me if I'm wrong) that anyone with money can buy the chips. They don't discriminate against non-Siemens companies. (The last I heard, the source of the chips was Siemens, but they are distributed through Profibus International and are thus "open".) In fact, almost all the industrial Ethernet solutions that I know of (PowerLink and EtherCat along with ProfiNet) use custom chips. They are not proprietary because the distribution is controlled by an open consortium. The only exceptions I'm aware of are EtherNet/IP from ODVA and Modbus/TCP. Opto 22 and National Instruments have long had solutions for Ethernet using standard commercial chips.
Custom chips undoubtedly allow developers some additional power. The question becomes, does the user need it? More precisely, don't get caught up in open v proprietary arguments. The real argument is -- does your application require what a custom ASIC provides--or not? So, when the sales guy comes knocking on your door, get them past the open/proprietary thing and focus on what it does for your problem. Then you're getting somewhere.
8:23:02 PM 
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Finally saw something new from Prosoft Technology blogger NL Belardes. He usually discussed successful (are there any other kind?) applications of the company's technology. In this post, he discusses linking Schneider Electric and Profibus. I discovered ProSoft products in the early 1990s when I needed to integrate Allen-Bradley products into a Modicon Modbus network. Reminded me of the really useful stuff I got from Black Box in my early PC networking days in the late 80s. Anyway, Nick, your link came up bad in my aggregator. Might double check.
4:20:41 PM
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Carl Henning over at Profibus posted an interesting blog in response to a ControlGlobal article on "fieldbus wars." Carl's response was that competition is good. Gee, that's hard to argue with. By the way, I don't have any idea what that means in terms of market share, but Carl and the Profibus people have been very active in both PR and other promotions as have the Fieldbus Foundation organization, while I seldom hear anything from the DeviceNet folks.
7:09:29 AM
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© Copyright 2006 Gary Mintchell.
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