Greater Safety

Profinet and Profibus offer greater safety with fault-tolerant high-performance controllers

Siemens Industry Automation division has improved its fault tolerant Simatic S7-400H high-performance controllers and equipped them with new functions. In addition, the range of controllers has been extended with the new CPU 416-5H. All CPUs now have a Profinet interface with a 2-port switch, larger memory and an expanded quantity structure for data and function block as well as function calls. One of the new functions concerns the master-reserve switchover that can now be programmed by the user. The performance has also been improved with extended resources for communication, for example. The Profinet interface with a 2-port switch is used for plant communication and supports fault tolerant H-connections via TCP/IP (ISO on TCP). In combination with the integrated MPI/DP and Profibus DP interfaces, the new Profinet interface permits the system-redundant connection of IO devices. Using fiber-optic cables, data synchronization is possible at distances of up to ten kilometers. In terms of performance, the new CPU 416-5H controller with 16 MB RAM is positioned between the 412-5H CPU with 1 MB, 414-5H with 4 MB and the 417-5H with 32 MB RAM. The controllers are programmed and configured using the Simatic Step 7 engineering tool. Start of delivery is planned for the first quarter of 2012.