With IEC 61491, Sercos (serial realtime communication system) established itself as the worldwide communication standard for automation. Sercos III uses industrial Ethernet for its transmission physics. The bidirectional full-duplex Ethernet communication provides full media redundancy.
The use of standardized profiles for drive technology, I/O, and communication between controllers (C2C) is increasing the range of possible applications for sercos III: For the first time, sercos can be used as a fully integrated Ethernet-based solution for drive and field bus communications, including communications in safety automation. Sercos III also permits parallel transmission of standardized or proprietary IP protocols over a non-real-time channel.
Sercos III is one of the first communication solutions, offering an energy profile: Sercos Energy is an application layer profile that defines parameters and commands for the reduction of energy consumption in a uniform vendor-independent manner.
Vendor-neutral and worldwide accepted: More than 50 controller manufacturers and 30 drive manufacturers worldwide support the standard. Sercos has been used in machine engineering for more than 20 years and is implemented in over 2,5 million real-time nodes.
Powerful: Sercos III is one of the most powerful Ethernet-based communication solutions currently on the market. Greater bandwidth makes sercos III even faster than sercos II. This allows a network update rate of 1 msec for up to 99 drives. An innovative synchronization procedure makes sercos III even more precise than before.
Cost effective: Sercos III allows a more cost effective design of communication solutions. Regardless the complexitiy of the automation solution, there is no need of hubs or switches. For installation CAT5e cable is generally sufficient.
Energy profile for enhancing energy efficiency: Sercos Energy allows the machine controls to switch connected components into energy-saving conditions, up to complete shut-down, in a targeted form. For this purpose, Sercos Energy makes the components' energy consumption transparent allowing for an intelligent control of loads.