Renesas Electronics introduced the ASI4U-V5 ASSP, a silicon offering that fully implements the ASi-5 (Actuator Sensor Interface version specification version 5) standard for industrial network equipment. ASi-5 offers superior performance and usability over ASi-3, delivering 1.27 ms cycle time, 200m cable length and 96 slaves per segment.
The field-proven ASSP delivers an easy-to-use fieldbus integration option for developers working with sensors, actuators, and other industrial equipment requiring easy and cost-efficient fieldbus connectivity. The ASI4U-V5 ASSP features a fully verified and field-proven firmware that reduces the complexity associated with ASi-5 implementations, allowing users to minimize design risks.
Reference samples of the fully qualified ASi-5 ASSP are available now. Mass production is planned for March 2020.
The ASSP is fully backwards compatible with ASi-3 devices while incorporating the shorter cycle times, higher bandwidth resulting from the use of Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM), enhanced diagnostics, and robustness associated with the ASi-5 standard. The ASSP also supports all bus topologies, including line, star, and tree. Users can also take advantage of easy and cost-efficient integration with other industrial protocols such as IO-Link and HART.
The Renesas ASI4U-V5 ASSP can integrate up to 96 devices and operation down to 1.2 ms cycle time with less than 10ns jitter compared with 5 ms cycle times for ASi-3 solutions; delivers support for up to 200m cable and 16 data bits per transport channel; and provides diagnostics and event handling for industry 4.0 applications. It is also backwards compatibility with ASi-3 devices, features robustness against electromagnetic disturbers, and is fully verified and field-proven firmware enables easy integration, as no further programming of the chip is required.
The new ASi-5 ASSP expands Renesas’ robust industrial network portfolio, which includes the RZ/N and R-IN32M series of network processors, the TPS-1, as well as IDT’s ASI4U and SAP5 devices implementing ASi-3.
“As the digital transformation wave sweeps across industrial factories and production facilities, the ASi-5 interface constitutes the shuttle into digitization for millions of connected industrial endpoints and devices at the edge,” said Niels Trapp, Senior Director of Industrial Automation Business Division at Renesas. “The tight collaboration of Renesas and its ASi-5 development partners proved to be extraordinarily successful, and we are excited to bring the first ASi-5 silicon solution to market and enable faster transmission of larger data quantities and more efficient integration with smart sensors that are becoming an integral part of the Industrial IoT.”
