Driving forward
August 1st 2007

Mitsubishi Electric AC drives are continuing to develop. Their increasing intelligence opens up the possibility of local process control. The effect is drives will adopt some PLC functionality.

Mitsubishi's Guy Kennett suggests that within a few years many drives will have IEC61131 programming capabilities, just like a PLC or intelligent drive. However they will tend to have their intelligence capped at being equal to micro and small PLCs or PAC but this would be unattractive to users who would consider the resultant architecture to be restrictive when it came to later systems reconfiguration.