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Instrumentation
Introduction
This industrial network standard was first proposed as a concept in 1984, and officially
standardized by the Fieldbus Foundation (the organization overseeing all FF standards
and validation) in 1996. To date, adoption of FF has been somewhat slow, mostly
limited to new construction projects. One of the “selling points” of FF is decreased
installation time, which makes it a more attractive technology for brand-new installations
than for retrofit projects.
To understand just how different FF is from other digital instrument systems, consider a
typical layout for a distributed control system (DCS), where all the calculations and
logical “decisions” are made in dedicated controllers, usually taking the form of a multi-
card “rack” with processor(s), analog input cards, analog output cards, and other types
of I/O (input/output) cards:
Information is communicated in analog form between the DCS controllers and the field
instruments. If equipped with the proper types of I/O cards, the DCS may even
communicate digitally with some of the field instruments using HART protocol. This
allows multivariable instruments to communicate multiple variables to and from the DCS
controllers (albeit slowly) over a single wire pair
Information is communicated in analog form between the DCS controllers and the field
instruments. If equipped with the proper types of I/O cards, the DCS may even
communicate digitally with some of the field instruments using HART protocol. This
allows multivariable instruments to communicate multiple variables to and from the DCS
controllers (albeit slowly) over a single wire pair
When the FF standard was being designed, two different network levels were planned:
a “low speed” network for the connection of field instruments to each other to form
network segments, and a “high speed” network for use as a plant-wide “backbone” for
conveying large amounts of process data over longer distances. The low-speed (field)
network was designated H1, while the high-speed (plant) network was designated H2.
Later in the FF standard development process, it was realized that existing Ethernet
technology would address all the basic requirements of a high-speed “backbone,” and
so it was decided to abandon work on the H2 standard, settling on an extension of 100
Mbps Ethernet called HSE (“High Speed Ethernet”) as the backbone FF network
instead.