Mitsubishi Electric now supports the high-speed CC-Link IE network for industrial communications based on the Indus-trial Ethernet standard. The company launched its first prod-ucts for the new network standard of the CC-Link Partner As-sociation (CLPA) at this year’s SPS/IPC/Drives trade show in Nuremberg, Germany. Using the latest cutting-edge technolo-gies, the new system builds on the Standard Ethernet proto-col but adds determinism and redundancy along with many other useful enhancements for industrial applications. CC-Link IE (Control and Communication Link Industrial Ethernet) is the first fully-integrated gigabit network technology for in-dustrial automation to be offered as an open standard.

This new generation network developed by CLPA is based on In-dustrial Ethernet, but it has also benefited from Mitsubishi Elec-tric’s tried and tested networking and Ethernet technologies. CC-Link IE represents a significant leap forward in technology com-pared to the copper-based Ethernet networks that are currently used in industrial applications, which are currently limited to maxi-mum data transfer rates of 100 megabits per second.

The CC-Link Partner Association (CLPA) is an international or-ganisation with over 900 member companies. The common goal of the members is to further the development and dissemination of the standardised network technologies CC-Link, CC-Link Safety, CC-Link/LT and CC-Link IE. CC-Link is already the leading field-bus protocol in Asia and it is now also becoming increasingly popular in Europe and America.