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Product category: Mid-range and Large PLCs
News Release from: Siemens Automation and Drives | Subject: 317-2 PN/DP
Edited by the Engineeringtalk Editorial Team on 24 June 2003

Controller sets up for industrial
Ethernet

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The 317-2 PN/DP is a powerful new CPU for Simatic-S7 300 controllers from Siemens Automation and Drives.

The 317-2 PN/DP is a powerful new CPU for Simatic-S7 300 controllers from Siemens Automation and Drives The CPU is a high-end unit that complements the company's recently announced low-end and modular CPUs

However, this device is particularly suitable for those users wishing to take advantage of industrial Ethernet due to its integral 100Mbit/s industrial Ethernet interface based on the Profinet communications standard.

Profinet is becoming widely used by suppliers of factory automation who are following the philosophy of component-based automation for delivering complete production lines or parts thereof, whether one-off special purpose machines or series machines.

The new CPU is therefore ideal as the intelligence at the heart of all or part of such a system, and it is even possible to program the unit over the Ethernet using the Step 7 software.

Furthermore, with 512Kbyte of RAM and extremely short instruction runtimes, the 317 CPU enables automation to run faster, thereby increasing throughput and profitability.

Instruction execution times are less than 1us for word operations and less than 5us for floating-point arithmetic.

In terms of I/O, the unit is capable of handling a maximum of 65,536 digital channels and 1024 analogue channels, and as many as 32 active connections can be maintained simultaneously with other programmable devices such as PLCs (programmable controllers), PCs or operator panels.

No fewer than 512 counters, 512 timers and 32,768 flags are available.

As well as the Profinet interface, the CPU 317-2 PN/DP is also equipped with a combination DP/MPI interface, which can be configured as either a Profibus master or Profibus slave.

This interface allows the distributed I/O to communicate at a rate of 12Mbit/s and up to 125 slaves can be connected.

To simplify integration with other equipment, the new CPU supports the Profibus DP V1 standard, so DP bus nodes can be parameterised acyclically.

One of the benefits of the CPU's substantial main memory is that graphical programming languages such as S7-Graph can be used for rapid, easy programming.

A maximum of 8Mbyte of additional memory can be installed in the form of micro memory cards should this extra capacity be required.

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