industrial automation, as well as demand for remote maintenance management of equipment due to the impact of the COIVD 19 pandemic. The most common way of data collection from is to have a one-way direct communication to send data to the upper-level devices. With the number of equipment to be installed has multiplied and at wide coverage of area, this is posing an increase in the cost to introduce new communication protocol to original wiring.
To minimize this additional cost impact, I am going to introduce a relatively low-cost, bi-directional 3-wire IO-Link communication, which can be implemented in small space and has been used for such equipment.
Renesas proposes IO-Link for Temperature Controller solution based on 32-bit RX23E-A MCU, which realizes temperature measurement using on-chip high-precision Analog Front End for signals processing, and communication control via IO-Link PHY within a single chip.
The integration of analog and MCU function in 1 chip help reducing board size significantly. This solution also contributes to reducing investigation time at the beginning of the development by providing application note, sample program with protocol stack, BOM, circuit diagram, all are easily downloadable from Renesas’s website.
IO-Link Communication Structure Diagram
Details of Solution Structure
Below is a picture of our demo kit running the sample program, which is operating real-time threshold update from the upper layer. Users can easily test the bi-directional communication, which is one of the advantages of IO-Link communication.
Bi-directional communication demo
With this solution, you can build your own IO-Link evaluation environment easily. This solution has been published on the web as an application note, “RX23E-A Group Example of IO-Link device (temperature sensor) “(document No: R01AN5676eJ0100). In addition, peripheral parts and other related components have been introduced on our Winning Combination webpage. Please refer to these materials during initial examination of space-constraints IO-Link communication.
