From a development point of view, the market does not need a lot of PLC software IDE suppliers, but they need to maintain lasting stability and high quality service and keep pace with the technological progress. As long as you look at the current PLC software suppliers in the world are only a few (such as 3S, KW, ISaGRAF, Axel, COPA-DATA, etc.), you can understand this truth. At present, the emergence of this small industry in China is still quite dynamic, there is no need for a large expansion in quantity, and it is important to have enough industry support to ensure its long-term sustained high-quality development. From the perspective of supply chain, PLC manufacturers are the downstream of PLC software developers. PLC software developers to their customers (that is, PLC manufacturers) in the past generally sold IDE software licenses, can provide the relevant runtime system for the customer’s MCU varieties and real-time operating systems.

In recent years, according to the domestic market demand, some domestic PLC software developers have found a new way to provide customers with PLC control systems based on ARM or X86 (including domestic chips), I/O modules, real-time industrial Ethernet master station and slave station hardware design reference templates. Because PLC software developers have advantages in software, they can support more functions on smaller MCU platforms that other companies need to use higher performance processors to complete, but also ensure better real-time performance and lower hardware costs. Of course, as a hardware template with industrial quality, it also needs to have environmental adaptability and electromagnetic compatibility guarantees.

IOP313

IOP313

The potential of this soft-hardware Design house marketing approach is to enable downstream customers, PLC integrators or end users to have their own branded products of industrial quality in a short period of time, such as three months or six months. The PLC platform software research and development company to control the hardware selection of PLC modules and the confirmation of supply channels, will undoubtedly provide the basic guarantee for the quality of PLC products; What PLC manufacturers should do is the quality control of mass production and how to integrate their knowledge and know-how into their own system through software modules. In this way, on the one hand, PLC software platform suppliers have evolved into PLC ODM suppliers; On the other hand, a benign development ecology is formed between the design and development of PLC hardware and software and the manufacturing of PLC products.

Closing remarks

To sum up, we are pleased to see that China’s current PLC technology has made a qualitative leap, its remarkable feature is not only from the hardware, software and system, or from the application point of view there is no so-called “stuck neck” soft, and is taking the road of independent and controllable development according to the diversified needs of China’s industrial market. This state of affairs is completely different from the past. In order to better orderly development in the future, it is necessary to establish a good ecology of cooperation between the development, production, sales, use and service parties, and promote the improvement of domestic PLC market share. At the same time, we should continue to study the quality control experience of industrial developed countries, such as Siemens PLC manufacturing quality control personnel whose quantity and quality are not weaker than developers, Japan Mitsubishi Electric small PLC production of zero inventory supply chain management and quality inspection methods, and so on. We still have a long way to go in these areas, and there are still many engineering and technical problems to overcome one by one.