The open source interface BiSS continues to gain increasing popularity. The bidirectional sensor interface introduced by iC-Haus in 2002 has already been licensed 500 times free of charge and has established itself as a worldwide standard in encoder and drive technology.

BiSS Association e.V. particularly welcomes its 500th licensee MESCO Engineering GmbH. With more than 30 years of experience in process and factory automation, MESCO is a competent partner in the field of innovative product development. The core competence of MESCO is the development of hardware and software for industrial communication with a special focus on functional safety and explosion protection. With profound knowledge of functional safety, MESCO supports the establishment of the TÜV Rheinland certified BiSS Safety protocol in industrial controls and enables the development of BiSS Safety systems with a safety integrity level up to SIL3.

BiSS Safety follows the trend of all-digital communication while taking into account functional safety. It can be fully mapped with the BiSS protocol and uses the same physical interface for simple integration of existing BiSS sensors and controllers into a BiSS Safety system.

Two independent position words are transmitted via the “Black Channel”: the “Control Position Word” with high resolution for accurate system control and the “Safety Position Word” for monitoring the requirements stated in DIN EN 61784-3.

According to Dr. Heiner Flocke – chairman of the BiSS Association e.V. and managing director of iC-Haus GmbH – two factors are decisive for the success and distribution of the BiSS interface: its technical advantages with unique features and open source licensing. “It was a logical step to place the organization and design in the hands of the BiSS Association and thus of the users who will present their BiSS products again at a joint BiSS booth at the SPS in Nuremberg. MESCO is an important service provider within this group and can significantly promote the distribution of the BiSS interface especially in safety systems”, says Flocke.

Thomas Best, managing director of MESCO Engineering GmbH, confirms: “For MESCO, joining the BiSS Association is an important step to be able to offer current services in the field of hardware and software development for drive technology and encoder manufacturers. We implement integrated functional safety solutions, as well as option boards and encoder interfaces through to the product certificate. With BiSS Safety, we can realize some new innovative customer projects”.

In addition to iC-Haus, several IC, FPGA, and IP providers now offer highly integrated components and firmware for automation and drive technology. BiSS Line as a physical layer offers unique selling points in single-cable technology as open source and also featuring forward error correction (FEC) for multi-slave systems.

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