High growth for Profinet and IO-Link

The communication technologies Profinet and IO-Link hosted by Profibus & Profinet International (PI) have shown high growth in the past year: A total of 8.5 million Profinet and 6.3 million IO-Link devices were newly installed in the market.

Despite pandemic-related delivery problems and other imponderables, the installation figures for Profinet and IO-Link continued to rise significantly in 2021. With 8.5 million Profinet devices installed in the market, PI recorded its highest annual figure to date, an increase of more than 22 per cent, bringing the total to 48.2 million. IO-Link experienced the strongest increase over the year with 30 percent. This is almost the same growth rate as in the previous year and, according to PI, "proof that the further development of IO-Link was driven in the right direction by the active experts and is also being consistently continued with IO-Link over SPE". The annual number of installed IO-Link devices is 6.3 million nodes, and the total number is now more than 27 million.

Regardless of the trend towards the Industrial Internet of Things, the fieldbus system Profibus also still records noteworthy installation rates. The annual figure for Profibus in 2021 was slightly lower than the previous year at 1.5 million devices, while the figures for Profisafe remained stable at 2.6 million and for Profibus in process automation at 0.8 million. The total number now stands at almost 19 million installed devices for Profisafe and almost 15 million for Profibus in process automation.

PI expects an upswing for Profinet in process automation from the publication of the specification documents for the physical layer standard Ethernet-APL: "Ethernet-APL has not yet contributed to the current figures, but in the near future it will ensure that Profinet is used across the board in all process automation," explains Dr Jörg Hähniche, board member of the German PI association PNO, head of the APL project and member of the management of Endress+Hauser Digital Solutions. "Reasons for this optimism are provided by the very well evaluated demo systems among users in the chemical industry."