Factory Instrumentation Protocol

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The Factory Instrumentation Protocol or FIP is a standardized field bus protocol. Its most current definition can be found in the European Standard EN50170.

Contents

History

The FIP standard is based on a French initiative in 1982 to create a requirements analysis for a future field bus standard. The study led to the European Eureka initiative for a field bus standard in June 1986 that included 13 partners. The development group (réseaux locaux industriels) created the first proposal to be standardized in France. The name of the FIP field bus was originally given as an abbreviation of the French "Flux d'Information vers le Processus" while later referring to FIP with the English name "Factory Instrumentation Protocol" (some references also use the hybrid "Flux Information Protocol").

Based on the requirements study other manufacturers created similar protocol definitions - starting in 1990 a number of partners from Japan and America merged with FIP to the WorldFIP standardization group (that later merged into the Fieldbus Foundation group). Along with the competing German Profibus the field buses were submitted for European standardization by CENELEC in 1996. Along with other field bus standards these CENELEC standards were included to the international IEC 61158 and IEC 61784 standards by 1999 where FIP is listed as the Communication Profile Family 5. Eventually FIP has lost ground to Profibus which came to prevail the market in Europe in the following decade - the WorldFIP homepage has seen no press release since 2002 (with the US based Fieldbus Foundation to haven taken the lead in ongoing development which however promotes H1 fieldbus for process automation).

Fieldbus Foundation was an organization dedicated to a single international, interoperable fieldbus standard. It was established in September 1994 by a merger of WorldFIP North America and the Interoperable Systems Project (ISP). Fieldbus Foundation was a not-for-profit trade consortium that consisted of more than 350 of the world's suppliers and end users of process control and manufacturing automation products. Working together those companies made contributions to the IEC/ISA/FDI and other fieldbus standards development.

Profibus communications protocol

PROFIBUS is a standard for fieldbus communication in automation technology and was first promoted in 1989 by BMBF and then used by Siemens. It should not be confused with the PROFINET standard for Industrial Ethernet. PROFIBUS is openly published as part of IEC 61158.

FOUNDATION Fieldbus H1 is one of the FOUNDATION fieldbus protocol versions. FOUNDATION H1 (31.25 kbit/s) is a bi-directional communications protocol used for communications among field devices and to the control system. It utilizes either twisted pair, or fiber media to communicate between multiple nodes (devices) and the controller. The controller requires only one communication point to communicate with up to 32 nodes, this is a significant improvement over the standard 4-20 mA communication method which requires a separate connection point for each communication device on the controller system.

The closest cousin of the FIP family can be found today in the Wire Train Bus for train coaches. However a specific subset of WorldFIP - known the FIPIO protocol - can be found widely in machine components.

Technology

There are three transmission speeds specified as 31.25kbit/s, 1Mbit/s and 2.5Mbit/s for cable and optical fibre. There may be 255 stations per segment with an overall address range of 65536 communication ports. The messaging protocol uses synchronized access to the channel with messages of 128 bytes length.

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