With a total membership of over 3,800 companies and about 30 million devices installed globally, the CLPA has established itself as a key player in automation worldwide.

We have led the way in open industrial Ethernet for many years. We were the first organisation to offer gigabit bandwidth for industrial Ethernet applications with CC-Link IE. In 2018, we continued our leadership by being the first to combine open gigabit industrial Ethernet with Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN).

TSN is a set of IEEE standards that adds deterministic features to standard Ethernet by making changes to layer 2 of the 7 layer OSI model. By incorporating this technology, CC-Link IE TSN is now setting the standard for connectivity in the Industry 4.0 age.

The main purpose of this special feature is to outline how TSN delivers the necessary network convergence required to address the process transparency demands of Industry 4.0. No matter whether you are an end user, a machine builder or a device vendor, TSN has the potential to add significant benefits to your business.

To highlight these benefits, the CLPA has recently written a white paper explaining what TSN is, how it works, why it is important and what the benefits are. This special feature gives you a quick overview of the contents and we encourage you to visit eu.cc-link.org to download the full version.

While TSN is arguably the most important trend in automation currently, unless it is implemented in actual devices that can be applied to produce a solution to real world problems, it will only be a novelty.

Hence, another key part of this special feature is to highlight what products have already been developed for CC-Link IE TSN by CLPA board member Mitsubishi Electric and hence can be used today to implement TSN based solutions.

2020 was the year when the CLPA marked its 20th Anniversary. As I wrote above, during the first 20 years of its existence, the CLPA has been an industry leader, with an established track record of introducing ground breaking new technologies for open automation networking. We have included a short overview of the first 20 years in this special feature, and why the CLPA expects to maintain its leading position for the next 20 years.

Finally, 2020 also saw a tenth industry leading company join the CLPA’s board of directors. Analog Devices became a CLPA board member in November 2020 and we are looking forward to the additional strength this leader in IIoT technologies will deliver to the organisation moving forward. You can read more details about this in the following pages.

We believe that CC-Link IE TSN represents the future of open industrial Ethernet. We and our partners would like the opportunity to discuss this with you further. Please get in touch!

John Browett, General Manager at CLPA Europe

Email: [email protected]