SERCOS III News
After more than a year's work by the SERCOS III working group, the specification for SERCOS III, the third generation of the SERCOS interface, has been completed. It will be delivered to the IEC as a Publicly Available Specification (PAS), as required for inclusion in the Real-time Ethernet standard, planned for 2007.
The specification will be distributed to members of the SERCOS trade associations in December, and will become available to non-members after the voting at IEC, expected by April 2005.
SERCOS III is based on Industrial Ethernet, maintaining the proven real time and synchronization mechanisms, as well as the extensive motion control profile, of the IEC 61491 standardized SERCOS interface.
First SERCOS III prototypes were presented to great interest at the SPS/IPC/Drives show in Nürnberg, Germany at the end of November.
At the show, Hilscher introduced a universal intelligent controller -- netX -- for SERCOS III. The family of netX-chips has an outstanding performance for real-time Ethernet communication. Furthermore, they are able to provide all important field bus and periphery interfaces for master and slave devices. This makes it possible to create inexpensive "single chip" controls and drives on the basis of the netX-chip with integrated CPU. Chip samples will be available in the first quarter of 2005.
SERCOS interface Interoperability Demo
An interoperability demo featuring SERCOS interface controls and drives from a number of different vendors was presented to a very favorable response in the OMAC Pack Workgroup booth at the Pack Expo show, November 7-11, 2004 in Chicago.
Controls from Automation Intelligence, Beckhoff, Bosch Rexroth, and Rockwell Automation were combined with servo drives from these companies, plus drives from Danaher motion. Several controllers also handled SERCOS I/O modules. The controls demonstrated the SERCOS Pack Profile (see link below) and other OMAC recognized technologies, such as IEC 61131-3 industrial programming and the OMAC PackML State Model, which defines a uniform set of machine states, tag names and data sets to standardize the communications among packaging machines.
The SERCOS interoperability demo was also displayed in the SERCOS stand at the SPS/IPC/Drives show at Nürnberg, Germany.
Read an article by Peter Lutz, entitled "Packaging Profile to improve the interoperability of controls and
drives".
Download version 1.1 of the 44-page Pack Profile
specification.
New Members of the SERCOS Organizations
SERCOS N.A. expanded its membership to sixteen companies with the recent addition of
Yaskawa Electric America of Waukegan, Illinois as an Associate Member. Yaskawa claims to be the world's largest manufacturer of ac drives and motion control products, including adjustable frequency drives, servo amplifiers, servomotors, machine controllers, and motion controllers. Single-axis and multi-axis motion controllers are designed for stand-alone, networked, and coordinated motion of industrial machines.
MDSI® of Ann Arbor, Michigan joined SERCOS N.A. as an OEM/Systems Integrator member a few months ago. MDSI is a worldwide provider of open-architecture CNC, motion control, and factory automation solutions. In 1993 MDSI revolutionized manufacturing with OpenCNC® -- the world’s first open-architecture, software CNC not requiring any proprietary hardware.
Two new members recently joined SERCOS International e.V. in Europe, Lust DriveTronics from Germany and Justek from Korea, bringing SERCOS International e.V. membership to 40 companies from Europe and Asia.
New SERCOS Logo
A new logo for the SERCOS interface was introduced recently at the SPS/IPC/Drives show in Nürenberg, Germany. This will be used for all identifications of the SERCOS interface, and will be phased in over the next few months.
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