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    Blog: Single-pair Ethernet – Market Potential and Hilscher’s approach

    Part 4: Market potential

    A lot of work is still ahead of the industry to get open questions resolved in terms of system adoptions, standard integration and leveraging benefits in relevant use cases. At the start of the SPE standardization activities, companies participating showed a quite significant business potential, partially looking similar to the huge expectations raised at the beginning of Industrie 4.0 and IIoT. Today the industry appears to get back to some more realistic view on the potential and the adoption process in the different industries as formerly shown in Single-pair Ethernet: Enhanced cloud access to sensors and peripherals. Hilscher took some analysis from the field, in order to estimate a potential number of installed SPE nodes based on possible adoption rates from legacy fieldbus, TSN and Ethernet networking technologies.

    Communication technology share of connected devices in production (Source: IHS Markit Technology 2019)

    Scenarios of possible deployment of TSN in Factory automation (Source: IHS Markit, 2019)

    Migration paths for SPE in automation industries

    As we showed, the industries have a different rate of integration and start of adoption of SPE. Therefore, we assumed a migration scenario as in the following Figure:

      SPE volumes is driven most from transfer from existing fieldbus technologies in process industries to SPE (APL), as the lever to materialize the benefits is highest. We expect initially a small cannibalization of installed nodes to move from existing Industrial Ethernet 10/100 eco systems into SPE. Also IO-Link is still in the ramp-up stage and investments into IO-Link devices and installations need to amortize first, before a larger installed base is taken over by SPE. Hence, Hilscher´s estimate for annual installed SPE nodes as shown in the table on the right.

      The first movers will be process automation applications and devices that transfer current fieldbuses to APL. Hence in 2022 we estimate to see first installed nodes in the field. Hilscher expects thereafter a rather fast transition to SPE from legacy fieldbus technologies to SPE and a moderate enhancement of the existing Ethernet Infrastructure in factory automation. Due to the increased digitization of process automation, we expect an increased convergence of the equipment and protocols in use in the industries. Furthermore, we expect an overall growth of networked equipment in the field that also contributes to a significant growth rate.

      Single Pair Ethernet with netX 90

      The implementation of SPE is very simple with netX 90. In our netXStudio development environment, the pinout is configured so that the MII interface is set externally instead of the internal PHY. The 10Mbit T1L PHY from different manufacturers are connected to this interface. Hilscher's firmware is prepared for various communication standards that have already integrated SPE into their architecture. With our development board you can start immediately and integrate SPE into your field device.

       

      Block diagram of the netX 90 communication controller with Hilscher firmware for SPE protocol stacks

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