Automation is driving quality, efficiency and technological advancement within the manufacturing world, and device makers in the industry must follow suit in delivering faster, more compact and highly flexible solutions. To help you keep pace with these developments, the Siemens SIMATIC IPC, which is widely used in PC-based automation systems, features connectivity for the next generation of expansion cards with the M.2 PC card.
Hilscher’s new M.2 card enables SIMATIC IPCs to take full advantage of all the protocols that Hilscher offers in a more compact and flexible IPC.
The M.2 form factor is extremely compact — smaller than a thumb — allowing you to include it in some of the most compact IPCs available on the market. Even though it is a new adoption in the industrial PC ecosystem, it features support for legacy protocols such as PROFIBUS and DeviceNet in addition to the latest Industrial Ethernet protocols, so you won’t be constraining your applications.
The cifX M.2 card is extremely versatile, enabling IPCs to connect to a wide range of industrial protocols. With this card, a single development project enables the full range of Hilscher’s offered protocol stacks and opens a much larger market to the IPC supplier. Hilscher supplies the full range of connections as options to the M.2 to accommodate the desired protocol. These all connect to the same M.2 board using the same drivers to build systems for the many protocols offered by Hilscher, from the full range of Ethernets to legacy fieldbuses including PROFIBUS, DeviceNet, etc.
To streamline development, Hilscher offers a wide range of driver toolkits for many operating systems, including C. These toolkits save weeks of the development time spent integrating the card into the application and IPC. Once the card is integrated, all protocol stacks are available.
Our M.2 card is available in two versions, 30x42 Key B+M (master and slave) and 22x30 A+M (slave only). Some additional features include:
● The smallest PC card of its kind for PCI Express integration.
● Uniform interface for all protocols and formats.
● A wide range of available drivers.
● Data access via dual-port memory or direct memory access.
● Extended temperature range.