Hello,
I have some questions regarding the licensing,
1. Modbus-TCP ; Modbus -RTU; DeiveNet, protocols are not shown amongst others. Does this mean they are not supported currently ? If so, when they will be supported and will they require license? what is the license cost?
2. Could you clarify for each of the protocols if the license is required?
(Profibus,Powerlink,ethernet I/p w/switch ,ethernet I/p PRU, PROFINET RT ,PROFINET – IRT ,Sercos-III)
3. Will my customer need to certify the protocol or is it already done by TI?
Please clarify for each protocol.
thanks
Modbus/TCP and Modbus RTU can be supported on any (even 8-bit) device that supports and Ethernet and serial port (respectively): they are pretty trivial application-level stacks (several are available on SourceForge etc.) and therefore there is no licensing discussion that applies to them. DeviceNet is similar, except that it just requires a CAN port. The DeviceNet application stack itself can be developed by almost anyone, but can also be purchased from 3rd parties (which I'm pretty sure TI is NOT one of). So the licensing of a DeviceNet stack would be a discussion to have with your chosen vendor if you decide to outsource it.
As far as I know, there are no licensing discussions that concern TI related to any of the protocols you mentioned. TI provides the PRU code (where applicable), and perhaps a demo stack, but you are always free to use any 3rd party application stack for any of those, and for that you would need to discuss licensing with your chosen 3rd party.
Certification (where necessary or desired) is always something that each end-user application must do. Even if a silicon or source code vendor "pre certifies" their offering, that is only one piece of the overall final application (which can always adversely affect any pre-certified elements). The final application would still therefore need to do its own certification (again, not all "certifications" are required depending on the protocol).
Darrin
Thanks Darrin,