Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/1347119
April/May/June 2021 I 13 environments represented by the food industry. The major challenge faced by the process industry has been the effort required to design a communication system that can safely operate in a hazardous environment, requiring intrinsically safe circuits which are incapable of producing a spark. Traditional Ethernet systems have been unable to meet these stringent requirements. As a result, Ethernet has not made progress to the edge of process automation. This is changing with the imple- mentation of SPE and the Ethernet-APL organization, which has formalized the use of SPE with modifications to allow its use in these environments. Another application ripe for SPE is building auto- mation. Intelligent buildings struggle to make progress against the multiple legacy silos that exist for various building systems. These systems include HVAC, access control, security, lighting, and other various subsystems. These systems use separate software systems and support various organizations and policies. Even the very infra- structure used to communicate to individual devices on these networks are incompatible, such as DALI for lighting, BACnet for HVAC, and RS-485 for fire alarms. The vast installed base of BACnet MS/TP for HVAC, for example, is ripe for an upgrade to TCP/IP; the upgrade is beginning to gain traction. Single-pair Ethernet provides a physical layer technology that can provide much needed cost and complexity reduction from device to installation, while still providing massive bandwidth upgrade and security improvement from traditional MS/TP networks. Even better, the 2-wire MS/TP protocol has potential to allow for an upgrade to SPE, depending on the future-proof status of the original system. Logistics automation, with its long conveyors and increasingly large warehouses, also will benefit from SPE. Condition monitoring sensors throughout a warehouse can be connected without worry about distance limit- ation, and switches can be more centralized as a result. Drives and IO placed on conveying lines can also be connected without requiring extra switch cabinets because the distance requires optical fiber connectivity or extra repeaters. Finally, SPE will be coming to the analog sensor. This may take longer than other applications to miniaturize and adapt the technology for the wide variety of very small sensors. However, the benefits of SPE with other emerging technologies, such as time sensitive networking (TSN), will drive the advantage of the converged Ethernet machine. This converged Ethernet machine will more intuitively share its data across the machine control system, enabling owners to leverage machine learning and artificial intelligence to drive further advances to their operation. Conclusion Ethernet has long been the standard for the computers that operate building and industrial automation systems. Over decades of development, many unique commu- nication protocols have become entrenched for specific applications. The data produced in these systems must be converted to Ethernet in order to be usable by plant operation systems. However, this conversion comes at an expense of engineering effort as well as reduced two-way communication to the device supplying the information. Single-pair Ethernet is a technology that moves the industry forward by providing international standard- ization of the physical layer onto Ethernet. It enables application and network layers, as well as network security architectures, to be brought even deeper to the edge of the network. Device vendors in intelligent building and industrial automation have an opportunity to take advantage of this technology and simplify their clients' networks by delivering seamless SPE integration into the automation system of the future. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY: Michael Vermeer is the engineering strategy manager for Industrial and Enterprise Businesses at Panduit Corp. He earned a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering from Purdue University and an MBA from DePaul University, Chicago. He has led businesses that make it easier for clients to rapidly design, deploy, and manage Ethernet networks and is excited about the potential for SPE to deliver a step function improvement in Ethernet convergence. Michael can be reached at michael.vermeer@panduit.com. REFERENCES: 1. Carlsson, Thomas. "Industrial network market shares 2020 according to HMS Networks," HMS, 29 May 2020.