A Single Partner for Factory Networking

LAPP expands its range of Industrial Communication solutions: from cables to connectors to active network components: LAPP customers can now count on a single supplier to satisfy every networking need of their machines and factory.

The Italian manufacturing sector is facing great challenges, which are profoundly changing the concept of doing business. If, up to now, enabling technologies for Industry 4.0, such as Industrial Ethernet, have been an important tool for optimizing production processes, today they are a fundamental prerogative to avoid service interruptions and ensure competitiveness for companies.
LAPP, a specialist in the field of connection and wiring technology, has enhanced its Industrial Communication portfolio with new solutions, ideal for various applications and protocols, with the aim of creating reliable, stable and secure communication infrastructures, a requirement now that has become essential.

New components and solutions for different applications and protocols

Modern infrastructures, which must increasingly be efficient and contained in size, are asked to be able to interconnect and make a growing number of machines and plants communicate with each other, both to effectively route and manage the increase in traffic and also to protect the company and its manufacturing facilities from growing hacker attacks.
To win the challenge, LAPP has recently enriched the ETHERLINE® ACCESS family of switches for data transmission in industrial Ethernet networks with new models. The PNF04T, PNF08T and PNF16T switches with 4, 8 or 16 ports are certified to support PROFINET’s conformance class B, they are among the most compact on the market and are particularly suitable for being mounted in decentralized control panels in the field.
The ETHERLINE® ACCESS NF04T NAT / Firewall solution, on the other hand, combines the dual functionality of Routing (Layer3) and Switching (Layer2), with an integrated firewall in order to secure communications between different corporate IP networks. In addition to the native Switch function, the NAT function (Network Address Translation) allows these devices to perform the 1: 1 static mapping of an internal IP address of the LAN to an external IP address of the WAN.

There are several guaranteed benefits: on one hand, OEMs can produce machines with the same IP address, without having to configure their end customer’s network ad hoc and, on the other, NAT 1: 1 ensures an optimization of times and costs of installation, without having to adapt the IP addresses already in use. In other words, communication can take place both from the LAN and the WAN network, making dedicated protocols unnecessary. Furthermore, the port forwarding function allows data transfer (forwarding) from one device to another via a specific communication port. This technique to allows an external user on the WAN to reach a device with a private IP address within a LAN.

The LAPP range extension is completed by the following switches: the Managed Switches ETHERLINE® ACCESS M08T02SFP and M08T02GSFP equipped with 8 RJ45 ports 10/100 Mbit/s and 2 SFP ports for the connection of fiber optic cables which are the ideal solution where high transmission speeds are required, up to 1 Gbit/s, in the presence of long distances; the Unmanaged Switches ETHERLINE® ACCESS U04TP01T with 5 RJ45 ports 10/100 Mbits/s.
Among these, the 4 POE (Power over Ethernet) ports, in addition to data transfer, provide power to connected devices.
Finally, among the latest innovations in LAPP’s Industrial Communication portfolio, ETHERLINE SERVO DQ FD P Cat.5e stands out, it is the feedback encoder cable for the DRIVE-CLiQ® interface from Siemens. There are several advantages that make it particularly suitable for harsh industrial environments and cable chains: resistant to UV rays, oils and chemicals, it also has a shield in tinned copper braid with a coverage level of 85%, to reduce EMC issues. The highly flexible internal structure and the PUR outer jacket also allows resistance to maximum mechanical stress.
ETHERLINE SERVO DQ FD P Cat.5e is equipped with all the necessary approvals for the use in machines and systems intended for the North American market.