World’s fastest PLC based on CPU scanning speed?

Yokogawa FA-M3V is a high-performance PLC with the world’s fastest CPU scanning speed, capable of scanning a 100,000-step program in one millisecond, according to Yokogawa Electric Corp., in a Feb. 7 announcement.

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Yokogawa Electric Corporation announces that it will release the FA-M3V range-free multi-controller to the global market by the first quarter of fiscal year 2011. The programmable logic controller (PLC) “delivers unrivaled CPU scanning speed performance, the FA-M3V for control discrete manufacturing processes and batch processes,” the company said, capable of scanning a 100,000-step program in 1 millisecond. The FA-M3V PLC (programmable logic controller) has been very well received since its November 2010 Japan release, the company said; Yokogawa estimated that this and the other models in the FA-M3 series have taken a 30% share of the mid- to large-size PLC market.

Capitalizing on the introduction of the high-performance FA-M3V, Yokogawa will expand its share of the PLC market and thus grow its industrial automation (IA) business. The FA-M3V joins a broad IA product lineup that ranges from distributed control systems (DCSs) to supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems and PLCs. The Centum DCS and ProSafe-RS safety instrumented system (SIS) are Yokogawa’s flagship products. These are integrated solutions for oil and gas, petrochemical, chemical, electric power, pulp and paper, pharmaceutical, iron and steel, and water supply and wastewater treatment plants. Yokogawa is also known as a supplier of open-architecture solution systems, and its Stardom network-based control system and Fast/Tools SCADA software are often deployed for oil and natural gas extraction facilities, upstream process equipment such as wellheads and pipelines, and widely-distributed facilities including water treatment plants and co-generation equipment.

Masatoshi Nakahara, General Manager of the Marketing Center at the Industrial Automation Business Headquarters, commented: "This high-performance FA-M3V PLC will meet the needs of customers in a variety of industries. I hope that the FA-M3V will play a leading role in our IA business.”

Product features include:

• High CPU speed, with ability to scan a 100 K-step program in one millisecond, which, Yokogawa sais is “the world’s fastest PLC in terms of CPU scanning speed.” The incredible speed is made possible by the hardware/firmware combination of Yokogawa’s Vitesse engine and a parallel instruction processing system (PIPS).
• Small and lightweight - With a built-in Ethernet port, the FA-M3V delivers single module processing and eliminates communications overhead, ensuring both higher throughput and a smaller footprint.
• Secure and reliable - The FA-M3V provides a login function with three layers of access control. Login history can be archived on an SD card (sizes up to 32 GB supported). The FA-M3V CPU comes with error check and correct (ECC) functionality, a world first. And even though ECC requires a certain amount of processing time, the FA-M3V is still capable of extremely high throughput.

Background: In 1989, Yokogawa entered the Japan PLC market with the FA500. The fast, compact, and smart FA-M3 range-free controller series was introduced in 1992. The FA-M3V is the latest addition to this series. The “V” stands for “vitesse,” which means “speed” in French.

www.yokogawa.com

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