Freescale & TMG TE Develop PROFIBUS On Silicon
Freescale Semiconductor and TMG TE GmbH have certified their first joint Process Field Bus (PROFIBUS) reference design through ComDeC PI Test Laboratory in Furth, Germany.
The solution integrates the commercial TMG PROFIBUS DP slave protocol stack on Freescale's QorIQ P1025 multicore processor in a Freescale Tower System development platform module, called the TWR-P1025.
This PROFIBUS solution, specifically developed for the TWR-P1025, can port to additional QorIQ P1 family processors, including the P1012, P1021, P1016 and P1025 products, as well as Freescale's MPC8309 PowerQUICC processor.
PROFIBUS is a popular field bus (communication) technology commonly used in industrial automation equipment, and is overseen by the PROFIBUS and PROFINET International (PNO/PI) organisation.
Claimed to have better control and online diagnostics, PROFIBUS enables improved asset management for industrial equipment, helping to ensure lower life cycle costs, better quality and higher productivity.
"For the first time, our customers can combine their control application simultaneously with PROFIBUS and/or PROFINET industrial protocols using a single Freescale processor," said Nikolay Guenov, marketing director for Freescale's Networking Processor Division. "This PI-certified reference platform helps reduce chip counts and system costs by connecting the QorIQ P1025 processor directly to an RS-485 transceiver, thereby eliminating the need for separate PROFIBUS ASICs or FPGAs."
The TWR-P1025 module is part of the Freescale Tower System portfolio, a modular development platform consisting of more than 50 controller and peripheral modules, enabling rapid prototyping and tool reuse through reconfigurable hardware. The TWR-P1025 processor module also can operate as a stand-alone single board computer (SBC) development platform.
For PROFIBUS evaluation, the TWR-P1025 controller module is enabled with an executable version of the TMG PROFIBUS software stack, Freescale PROFIBUS layer 2 microcode and applications programming interface (API) source code.
Earlier this year, Freescale demonstrated a PROFIBUS pre-release solution running on the TWR-P1025 module at the 2012 Embedded World conference and at the Freescale Technology Forum-San A.
