PLC squeezes onto a chip

A German electronics company, profichip, claims to have developed the first complete PLC on a chip. As well as the PLC processor, the company`s PLC 7001 chip also includes I/O, a peripheral bus, serial communication interfaces, and user memory.

The chip, which is said to be comparable in performance with Siemens` S7-4000 CPUs, is aimed at small to mid-sized applications requiring up to 128kb of PLC memory. The chip is due to enter production in the third quarter of this year.