Product Description:

The FC3102-0000 interface card is manufactured by Beckhoff and belongs to the FC Lightbus Cards series. Installed in a 32-bit PCI slot, the board provides a PROFIBUS gateway that connects PC-based controllers to decentralized field devices. It implements telegram processing on its own hardware, thereby reducing CPU load and maintaining deterministic exchange cycles that are required in motion, packaging, and continuous-process automation tasks. Two independent channels allow separate networks to be managed from one host system.

Communication bandwidth reaches 12 Mbit/s, and the internal firmware completes a bus cycle in only 200 µs, so set-point and feedback data appear in the host memory with minimal latency. A C166 microcontroller clocked at 25 MHz commands both channels and can transfer up to 244 bytes per slave while buffering telegrams in 4 kbyte dual-port RAM on each path. The PCI side exposes a 32-bit target that maps the process image directly into system memory, letting real-time tasks access it without additional copying. Supported fieldbus variants include PROFIBUS DP, DP-V1, DP-V2, and PROFIBUS MC, so legacy sensors and high-speed drives can share the same cable.

In operation, the board’s two channels appear as separate masters; each channel is wired through two isolated 9-pin D-sub connectors, and two diagnostic LEDs per channel show run and error states. Network density scales to 125 slaves on every segment, and the overall process image is limited to 2 × 3 kbyte of cyclic I/O. Configuration data and acyclic messages reside in 512 KB of RAM per channel, all powered from the backplane’s 5 V supply. Application software can switch the device between master and slave roles, allowing it to assume either supervisory control or subordinate participation in complex PROFIBUS topologies.