Whitepaper | Smart digital input integration for more rugged and safer factory automation solutions

How a self-powered digital input current limiter can ease design integration
   
 
  
As industrial processes become more advanced and connected, factory floor space is typically at a premium and control cabinet and their components must be compact and energy efficient.
As a result, designers of machinery equipment need to find efficient, quiet and compact solutions that meet today's new thermal management constraints, while ensuring the safety and well-being of human workers operating close to new collaborative robots or ‘cobots’. 
 
In this whitepaper, learn how engineers working on a wide range of process, industrial, and building automation applications can better protect their equipment and ensure the safety of their personnel through the use of a robust, low-power approach based on self-powered digital input current limiters.
In this whitepaper, learn how engineers working on a wide range of process, industrial, and building automation applications can better protect their equipment and ensure the safety of their personnel through the use of a robust, low-power approach based on self-powered digital input current limiters.

ST offers a rugged, low-power approach to designing safe, EMI robust solutions based on self-powered digital current limiters.

Takeaways from this whitepaper:

  • An overview of the transformation of manufacturing and how new automation control systems interface with the real world
  • Functional safety considerations when managing and integrating industrial digital inputs
  • ST’s solution and the advantages of a self-powered, non-linear method of digital input integration:
  • Functional safety features
  • Ease of design integration
  • Reliable operation in electrically noisy industrial environments
  • Self-powered digital input current limiter ICs and developer resources

 

After reading this whitepaper, the power and dissipation limitations of using a passive discrete component current limiter input for industrial programmable logic controllers will no longer be an issue. A more robust, low-power approach using ST’s CLT03 series of digital input current limiters yields much less heat generation, enabling greater input module density in space-constrained industrial control cabinets, and ultimately, easing SIL certification for final industrial or building automation applications