ProtoCessor
OEM Industrial Protocol Modules
ProtoCessors are a family of low cost TTL to RS-232, RS-485, Ethernet and LonWorks Embedded Coprocessor module. These allow OEMs to rapidly implement various Industrial, Building and Machine Automation protocols in their products.
In one stroke, adding a socket to the OEM's PCB increases sales of building, industrial or machine control products by ensuring compatibility with a broad range of serial and Ethernet protocols. At the same time costs are dramatically reduced by eliminating the need to install unused capacity where not required.
ProtoCessors also relieve engineering and marketing from committing to a single protocol and from having to maintain skills in mulitple protocols. Now designers can take advantage of the extensive library of FieldServer Technologies' protocol drivers and they can be confident of their ability to support any future protocol.
ProtoCessor Benefits
- Increased Sales: OEMs can offer many protocols that ProtoCessor provides with very little effort. Supporting these industry standard protocols will expand the markets for the OEMs in building, industrial or machine controller applications.
- Reduced Costs: ProtoCessors only need to be installed where necessary, avoiding delivery of unnecessary capability and cost.
- Dramatically reduced NRE: No costly purchase of source code and/or significant engineering time required. All required source code and hardware is provided.
- Rapid Time-to-Market: Minimal coding and hardware demands or changes to current OEM design required.
- Minimal Impact to application hardware and software design: A single socket needs to be added to the OEM’s Design. ProtoCessor is compatible with 8/16/32 bit Microcontrollers. Once the single interface to the ProtoCessor family has been added, the OEM can use any field protocol module.
- No need to develop and maintain in-house protocol support services: This can be very costly and time consuming. No need to reinvent the wheel. FieldServer Technologies has many decades of experience developing their proven protocols. FieldServer has an extensive knowledge base and technical resources to provide complete support for any protocol need.
- Compliancy “built-in”: Full protocol compliance is assured through continuous testing and certification of the protocols through the various governing groups that set the standards.Rapid Time-to-Market.
ProtoCessor Supported Protocols
OEM's Host |
Serial Field |
Ethernet Field |
LonWorks |
ZigBee |
DeviceNet Profibus |
Modbus RTU |
Allen Bradley DF1 |
Modbus TCP |
Q2-2005 |
Q3-2005 |
Q4-2005 |
Choose any of the protocols in the first column to act as the interface between the Host System and the ProtoCessor. Then choose a protocol in the subsequent columns to be supported by your equipment.
*Small NRE to port custom host protocol to the ProtoCessor
Full Function and Application Specific Families
|
FFP |
ASP |
Configuration |
Fully configurable via downloadable file or by Host CPU via PCP driver |
Hard-coded configuration involving NRE, fixed configuration for mass produced, lower cost applications |
CPU |
32 bit ARM-7 CPU |
Microchip PIC |
Program memory |
2 MB |
48 KB |
RAM |
8 MB |
2 KB |
PCP driver supports configuration |
Yes (Complex binary PCP protocol) |
No (Easy ASCII PSP protocol) |
PCP driver mode |
Client |
Server |
PCP driver provides data transfer |
Yes |
Yes |
Downloadable configuration |
Yes - over Ethernet |
No |
Remote diagnostics |
Full |
Minimal |
Multiple simultaneous drivers |
Yes |
No |
Ethernet configuration port always included |
Yes |
No |
Cost per unit |
Higher |
Lower, but with NRE upfront |
Point count |
1000's |
100s, <1000 depending on protocol |
A Rapid Development Kit (RDK) is available for quick and easy implementation. This includes a ProtoCessor Development board, documentation and technical support. The RDK can be loaded with any of the supported host and field protocols for immediate "out of the box" protocol testing and evaluation.
