Alternative powerline communications interfaces for the use in arbitrary networks

The utilization of field bus applications in industrial networks has grown very fast in the last years. This development is caused by the continuous increase of sensors and actuators for modern automation and control concepts. However, some scenarios have shown that several and distributed arranged system nodes cannot be provided with energy. In these cases system energy and information must be transmitted in parallel on the same medium-the so-called powerline communication. But to adapt the powerline technique in industrial networks special demands on real-time capabilities, fault tolerance, disturbance immunity and cost/expenditure-minimized transceivers have to be fulfilled. Especially in arbitrary networks like the controller area network (CAN) these demands are hard to resolve. This paper shows a further development of a transceiver that can be used in arbitrary powerline networks.