1. Safety technology is becoming a hot topic in the industry.
Whether for OEM machine manufacturers or process industries such as oil and gas, power, and transportation, as the speed of modern production systems continues to increase, their demand for safety is becoming more urgent. The concept of "life above all else" has gained unanimous recognition in the industry and has been actively implemented.
However, security technology is not a simple hardware issue. According to the definition of IEC 61508, security involves the entire lifecycle of the system. From the assessment of system risks, hardware development, program design, system use, and dismantling, everything in the entire lifecycle must be clear and strictly controlled. Certified engineers design standard-compliant hardware and software in a controlled process, ensuring transparency and documentation throughout the process. All of this means a huge investment.
2. openSAFETY - Enables interconnection of security systems on different buses.
For large end-users, upgrading existing systems to meet security standards is extremely difficult. Traditional automation vendors may need to replace the entire system to achieve a security upgrade within a unified architecture; however, this is a disaster for enterprises, as it means being tied to a single vendor and incurring huge costs. OpenSAFETY, however, can easily solve the upgrade problem for existing systems without replacing them, enabling various bus systems conforming to Profinet, EthernetIP, SERCOSIII, and EthernetPOWERLINK to achieve SIL3 security design. This provides large enterprises with a convenient key to upgrade their systems to meet security standards without requiring additional development and certification for communication system upgrades.
openSAFETY relies on its unique black channel mechanism, which is independent of the physical layer of various existing buses. It provides only an application interface and monitoring and control of data communication, so that data transmitted through any bus is packaged and unpacked under secure verification.
3. Certified openSAFETY technology
openSAFETY is a proven technology with a functional safety compliance level of SIL3 achieved by TUV, meeting the safety requirements of machine control. It is a safety-certified communication technology, and one of its biggest advantages to users is that if a safety system needs to be designed, the communication aspect can be used directly without complex design, and it can pass safety certification.
4. Current Status
openSAFETY can be implemented on any bus. Currently, openSAFETY has been recognized by several vendors and implemented on their buses. The following are some popular bus technologies that have already been adopted:
1. Profinet is a bus technology developed by SIEMENS. As a new generation of technology, it supports the physical layer of Ethernet and the 1. Application layer protocol of Profinet. It is jointly supported by manufacturers such as SIEMENS and Phoenix.
2. Modbus was developed by Schneider and is widely used.
3. SERCOSIII was developed by Rexroth, a company specializing in CNC machining, and uses standard Ethernet with a transmission rate of 100Mbps.
4. EthernetIP is a bus technology provided by Rockwell AB, which implements transmission based on Ethernet switch networks and uses standard Ethernet technology.
EthernetPOWERLINK was developed by B&R in 2001. It is a 100Mbps real-time Ethernet technology and is open source. It can achieve a refresh cycle of 200µs. Currently, it has nearly 200,000 different devices installed with nearly 2 million nodes.
