RICHARD TIMONEY, FIELDBUS FOUNDATION, PRESIDENT

The Fieldbus Foundation had many important achievements in 2007. As tens of thousands of Foundation-compliant control systems, and over a million fi eld devices, are now in service around the world, ARC Advisory Group says our technology is now “mainstream,” holding a 68 percent market share in the process industries.

The coming year will see progress on many key projects: the Foundation for Safety Instrumented Functions (SIF) development will help meet the growing worldwide demand for commercial, standards-based safety instrumentation incorporating Foundation fi eldbus; we are working with the Hart and Profi bus organizations to develop a specifi cation for a common interface to a wireless gateway in order to facilitate integration of both wired and wireless technology in industrial automation; and we will accelerate our work defining the structure for interfacing remote I/O over our High Speed Ethernet (HSE) control backbone, to tighten the integration of process instrumentation within the Foundation system solution.