GENOA FIELDBUS COMPETENCE CENTRE S.r.l.
We believe it is important to make our history known, since it is precisely from the past that those experiences derive that allow us today to be an entrepreneurial reality always looking to the future.
For some of us, our professional adventure in the world of industrial computing begins in 1987-88.
The idea was to create a company and then invest in a sector that was semi-unknown at that time: the use of the PC in the supervision systems of industrial automation processes and consequent development of the communication protocols associated with it.
The idea was to acquire data from the field independently of the operating system and instrumentation used.
At the time, proprietary operating systems were used and the connections were dominated by serial and parallel line protocols, also proprietary.
The most popular operating system was MS-DOS and the most advanced processor was the 80286 with 640 Kb of RAM.
In the period 1988 – 1990 the market began to understand the potential of the PC and the first supervision programs were born based on simple interfaces and sometimes with monochrome screens.
From the beginning it was clear that one of the problems was interfacing with the field devices which were many, of different manufacturers and different protocols.
Also was coming, a new IBM OS / 2, multitasking, multi-window and multi-threaded operating system – a revolution for the time!
But in the meantime Windows, passing through the Office applications, was also starting to peep out in automation thanks to its user-friendly interface and attractive look.
Over the years Windows spread rapidly with various versions (3.11, 95, 98, NT, XP, Vista, …), and the community of developers increased day by day, thanks above all to development tools and standard interfaces (for example the DDE).
Thus the need arose to make not only devices with different communication protocols communicate with each other, but to use PCs with different OSs.
We were the first in Italy to develop, propose and technically support solutions that ensured the simultaneous acquisition of data from different devices, even with different protocols, and independently of the Windows OS installed on the PC.
Strengthened by this experience, in 1991 the Technical and Commercial Partnership with a French company began Applicom International SA. then it would become the absolute world leader in this sector:
Thanks to the “APPLICOM technology” we were able to know and learn the Fieldbus and Ethernet Technologies that were peeping out (PROFINET®, PROFIBUS®, WorldFIP, EthernetIP, CanOpen, Modbus, Batibus, …).
The synergy was so strong and well managed, that Applicom International decided to enter, as a reference shareholder in the capital of our company. company.
Our company in Genoa had a very high level structure with highly specialized technicians in industrial communication and developers who implemented innovative technologies in order to make the “applicom” product at the forefront of the market for simplicity of implementation and use and quality of operation.
Already at the time there was a close collaboration with theUniversity of Genoa, College of Engineering (THE).
Beginning in 2001, Applicom International SA joined the Woodhead Inc. (USA) and then in 2006 in Molex Inc. (USA).
In 2010 Genoa Fieldbus Competence Center was born as a University Spin Off, from the entrepreneurial spirit of those who want to continue this activity in the industrial communication sector, thanks to over twenty years of experience, meeting the high-level competence of Professors and Researchers of the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Genoa. , to strengthen and develop the three concepts that are the basis of this new Genoese reality:
Experience – Service – Innovation
