Mergers Alter Industrial Landscape

Jan. 20, 2015
Some things change for good reasons, some don’t. End-users and manufacturers benefit from the new situation.

The merger of the HART Communication Foundation and the Fieldbus FOUNDATION turned into reality at the start of this year. In mid-2015, the FDI Cooperation Group will be dissolved and the FieldComm Group will undertake the maintenance of the FDI tools and components. All technologies will be maintained and further developed under the same roof. This is true for the HART and FOUNDATION Fieldbus protocol families as well as for two integration standards, EDDL (Electronic Device Description Language) and the newly developed FDI (Field Device Integration) tools. FDT and PROFIBUS remain independent. Why? FDT and PROFIBUS are widely used in the factory automation. It makes sense that independent organizations maintain the technologies and support the vendors and end users.

The aforementioned mergers directly and indirectly have positive effects for FDI and FDT based products. An obvious aspect is that the communication protocols specifically annexed to the FDT specification will now be maintained centrally by the FieldComm Group, and will offer device and EDD / FDI Device Package registration services along with development and test environments under one roof. Compatibility between FDI and FDT will also be jointly maintained by the FDT Group and the FieldComm Group. This will guarantee reliable and stable solutions.

Another less obvious benefit for FDT/DTMs comes from something completely unexpected - EDDL. It provides a standardized way of describing communication protocol specific device without using a DTM. However, some device manufacturers started to use EDDs as a basis for the DTM development. The main benefit of this approach includes a huge time saving aspect for DTM creation during the initial development phase and provides ease of maintenance for updates.

Nevertheless, there is an even simpler way to create a device DTM. An Interpreter DTM (iDTM) from CodeWrights is a full-featured device DTM that carries the standard EDD-Interpreter components to execute your existing EDDs or FDI Device Packages during runtime. Generating from an EDD or integrating the EDD interpretation into the DTM development process is no longer required. For you, the difference is big because it is so easy and cost effective!

On the way to your iDTM, CodeWrights provides a complete set of analytic services for your EDD/FDI Device Package to potentially improve existing solutions (e.g. offline configuration, development of UIPs or Extension Modules) and can also assists with device registration and certification testing. Customized training sessions for knowledge building are available also. CodeWrights uses a solution-oriented approach to meet your objectives - efficient device integration while maximizing the value for your customer. Because software developers are a scarce resource today, we want you to keep your focus on your core business, your devices! Let CodeWrights simply integrate your device and communication DTMs.

For more information please visit: www.codewrights.de/never-simpler

CodeWrights. Simply Integrated.

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