Development of an industrial communication interface for a temperature sensor

Fieldbuses are the most common used communication systems in industrial applications. Nowadays there are a lot of incompatible different solutions causing economic waste when little change in bus definitions are carried out. This paper proposes the implementation of reconfigurable fieldbuses using reconfigurable devices like FPGA (field programmable gate array) or PLD (programmable logic device). To evaluate the viability of this solution, this work implements the PROFIBUS (Process Fieldbus) protocol in an Altera's FPGA to connect a temperature sensor to a PROFIBUS bus. The physical level of the protocol as well as the required services of the data link level have been implemented in the FPGA.