The protracted “fieldbus standard war” has finally ushered in the halftime moment.

On January 4, 2000, the IEC announced that the international standard for Fieldbus was approved by 86% in favor and 12% against, and the IEC 61158 standard was officially published and will be published and implemented on December 31 of that year.

However, even the hard-won IEC 61158 is not a unified standard in the full sense of the word. It contains eight different types of bus protocols, which are incompatible with each other and far from the original intention of IEC.

Until today, the fieldbus market is still a situation where dozens of buses coexist.

03

Break the monopoly of EPA fieldbus

Talking here, it is not difficult to find a problem that the mainstream fieldbus is mainly led by European and American enterprises, which have the standards and patents of relevant technologies, and master the right to speak in the industry. In this area, Chinese companies have been absent for a long time and are at the mercy of others.

The emergence of EPA bus has changed this situation.

The full name of EPA is Ethernet for Plant Automation, which is specially developed for the high-speed, determined, real-time, safe and reliable communication needs of industrial control systems, and solves a number of key technical problems in the field of Ethernet application in control.

In 2005, the EPA was officially accepted as the IEC PAS standardization document. In 2007, the EPA international standard, which was incorporated into the IEC 61158 standard system, was released, which became China’s first international standard in the field of industrial automation, with complete independent intellectual property rights, 100% mastery of core technology, without any foreign authorization.

The EPA International standard covers six components: EPA Fieldbus protocol, EPA Real-time Ethernet Technology protocol, EPA Functional Safety Communication protocol, EPA Cable and installation standard, EPA driver standard and EPA Distributed redundancy protocol.

Among them, EPA cable and installation standards have been introduced as German national standards in Germany, which has always been known for its rigor, and have become a typical case of China breaking the international monopoly in the field of industrial standards and striving for international discourse power.

EPA fieldbus technology has also won the “China Standards Innovation Contribution Award”, “National Technological Invention Award Second Prize”, “China Patent Excellence Award” and other major awards.

Standard first is the law of market competition in the era of knowledge economy. Whoever develops the standards recognized by the world will have the right to speak the rules of the industrial game. The fieldbus dispute, which has lasted for more than a decade, is actually a battle for the right to speak in the industry.

Around the fieldbus, after the multi-party game, the belated IEC 61158 standard system is only a compromise result. In recent years, with the rise of industrial Ethernet, the market share of fieldbus has been a positive impact, and the fieldbus war has gradually escalated into the battle between fieldbus and industrial Ethernet.

Therefore, in the foreseeable future, the competition in the field of industrial communication networks will remain fierce.

For the Chinese enterprises that were once in a backward position, in the face of this fierce competition in science and technology game, adhering to an independent and controllable standard system and technical force is the only way for us to stand out from the new round of industrial revolution.

The mountains are high and the road is long. We are on our way.