OPC UA hardware offloading engine as dedicated peripheral IP core

OPCUA is a promising candidate for achieving a vertical semantic integration of field devices in the next generation of industrial automation topologies. Microprocessing platforms embedded in sensors and actor do however not provide the memory and computing resources required to integrate OPC UA communication stacks. To enable the usage of OPC UA on limited platforms, this article introduces a dedicated, highly scalable hardware server stack, synthesizable on 75.800 μm2 using 28 nm CMOS technology as well as FPGAs, that can process OPC UA as a peripheral component.