IO-Link Firmware Update Reference Design Leveraging MSP430 FRAM Technology

1 января 2018

IO-Link offers new options for communication between the system control and field level. Today, even the smallest sensors have a powerful microcontroller and several thousand lines of software code. Firmware updates may occasionally be necessary, for example, to fix bugs or to enable new functionalities. This reference design demonstrates the advantages when using a MSP430 microcontroller with FRAM technology for firmware updates with IO-Link instead of using a MCU with flash memory.

Особенности

Updating FRAM takes 100x less time and there is no pre-erase required Data can be written to FRAM on-the-fly right out of the IO-link channel, with no buffering required CPU is not held in the process of writes and interrupts are not blocked Data will not be lost in case of power failure IP encapsulation module: protect portions of memory from unwanted reads Complies to IO-link specification v1.1 and to IO-link profile BLOB transfer and firmware updates v1.0