Secure-by-design universal networking for a more flexible and efficient industry
Can OPC UA FX revolutionize industrial communication?
OPC UA (Open Platform Communications Unified Architecture) is the leading standard for secure, vendor-independent communication in industrial automation. It enables seamless data exchange between machines, controllers and IT systems, improving integration and efficiency.
Until now, companies have faced challenges: Complex IT-OT integrations, security requirements and non-deterministic communication solutions have made it difficult to scale, increased costs and delayed innovation.
OPC UA FX (Field eXchange) extends OPC UA to provide secure, deterministic real-time communication and maximum interoperability from sensor to cloud. This gives machine builders and plant operators a future-proof solution for seamless, secure and high-performance industrial networks.
Future-proof technology with benefits
Open flexibility
OPC UA FX brings the openness of OPC UA to time-critical manufacturing operations at the field level. Manufacturers gain the freedom to choose optimal solutions tailored to their specific requirements without being constrained by proprietary systems. Similar to the plug-and-play simplicity of consumer electronics, OPC UA FX supports “plug-and-produce” interoperability, enabling devices to automatically discover, configure and be seamlessly integrated into production environments.
Security by design
With cybersecurity regulations like the Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) setting stringent standards, OPC UA FX incorporates robust, built-in cybersecurity measures including auditing, authentication and encryption. This approach safeguards both Internet-connected and isolated (air-gapped) machines without adding unnecessary complexity, effectively bridging today's technological capabilities with the evolving security demands of tomorrow.
Superior performance
OPC UA FX delivers ultra-low latency and deterministic multi-gigabit-per-second data transmission over a single Ethernet connection. By providing precise synchronization and optimized bandwidth usage, it ensures the reliable, real-time communication that is critical for high-performance, time-sensitive industrial applications. OPC UA FX converges multiple traffic types (cyclic with different cycle times and acyclic) within a single network, thereby reducing cabling requirements and conserving bandwidth.
IT-OT convergence
OPC UA FX, built on TSN, bridges IT and OT by allowing time-critical control data and non-deterministic traffic to coexist on a single secure network. This unified approach streamlines data exchange across plant floors and enterprise systems, enabling real-time analytics, reducing infrastructure complexity and delivering high performance and reliability.
Less cost, more innovation
OPC UA FX features standardized, reusable, information models, significantly accelerating machine development and reducing engineering costs. It eliminates the need for extensive in-house expertise in legacy technologies, while secure sensor-to-cloud connectivity unlocks opportunities for innovative business models and value-added services.
OPC UA FX – Smart networking for maximum efficiency
Extend OPC UA
OPC UA FX builds directly on OPC UA and extends it to meet the needs of time-critical field-level applications. It maintains full interoperability with existing OPC UA functionality.
TSN
OPC UA FX uses TSN (Time-Sensitive Networking) to ensure deterministic network performance, providing precise time synchronization, guaranteed low latency, seamless redundancy, convergence of multiple types of scheduled and unscheduled traffic and secure network management. This ensures that time-critical data always reaches its destination reliably and on time.
Framework
OPC UA FX incorporates advanced IT-grade security features such as auditing, authentication and encryption into its architecture. By eliminating the need for external layers of security, it significantly reduces system complexity and cost, making it easier to comply with evolving security regulations.
Data exchange
Pub/Sub (Publish-Subscribe) communication enables efficient and scalable one-to-many data distribution, which is essential for robust real-time data exchange in industrial environments.
Data modeling
OPC UA FX extends the core OPC UA data model by integrating detailed field-level semantics, greatly improving interoperability across devices and streamlining integration across disparate systems. Graph support preserves the original source context, ensuring robust data relationships within the system, while the data model is easily extended by vendors through companion specifications. These domain-specific companion specifications address discrete applications such as robotics and machine vision, process automation standards such as FDI, FDT, PA-DIM, MDIS and NOA, and energy-oriented frameworks such as IEC 61850. In total, this approach covers more than 60 different types of industrial machines.
Industrial safety
OPC UA FX supports fail-safe data communications tailored for applications that require compliance with stringent safety standards, ensuring reliability even in critical scenarios. Unlike other safety protocols that are constrained by limited address space, OPC UA FX Safety unifies standard control and safety functionality in a vendor-neutral architecture with virtually unlimited addressing. By leveraging user roles, authentication and encryption, it ensures that each safety parameter set can only be accessed by users authorized for that particular parameter set, providing robust, future-proof interoperability for large-scale industrial environments.
Compliance
All OPC UA FX products are subject to mandatory third-party certification. This rigorous certification ensures interoperability and compatibility between products from different vendors.
B&R OPC UA FX portfolio
B&R offers a wide range of products that support open and real-time OPC UA FX communication. These products enable fully standardized networks for modular and flexible machine concepts, making truly economical production in batch sizes of one a reality. B&R's OPC-UA-FX-ready portfolio includes X20 controllers, bus controllers, industrial PCs, panel PCs and a TSN machine switch. The engineering software Automation Studio is used to configure the OPC-UA FX-enabled devices and the network itself, as well as to assign access rights. With this comprehensive range, B&R covers all automation requirements.
Industrial PCs
High performance industrial PCs - rugged, reliable and designed to meet the most demanding automation requirements. Find out more about the
Industrial PC portfolio
Network modules
Seamless I/O connectivity with B&R bus controller modules - perfectly integrated for maximum performance. Find ou more about the
TSN switches
Controllers
Programmable logic controllers - powerful, scalable and perfectly matched for precise automation solutions. Find out more about the
X20 PLC portfolio
I/O connectivity
Optimal I/O connectivity - flexible, powerful solutions for seamless integration into your automation systems. Find out more about
UAFX bus controller
Automation Studio
The powerful development environment for programming and simulating automation solutions. Find out more about the
Automation Studio
Why choose B&R as a partner?
B&R is a pioneer in the specification and implementation of OPC UA FX for industrial automation solutions. As a founding member of the OPC Foundation's Field Level Communications Initiative, we are leading the development of OPC UA FX in close collaboration with global industry leaders.
Our deep expertise and active role in shaping this open standard ensures that you have a knowledgeable, trusted partner to meet your automation challenges.
Our extensive portfolio of OPC-UA-FX-enabled products and solutions provides you with unmatched flexibility, reliability and performance. By partnering with B&R, you gain access to advanced automation technologies that are specifically tailored to the unique requirements of your industry.
At B&R, your success is our priority. Our dedicated team of experienced product managers, marketing specialists and communications experts provide personalized guidance to ensure a smooth and successful OPC UA FX implementation. We work with you every step of the way to help you achieve your automation goals efficiently and effectively.
In the industrial world, we're often faced with a jumble of networking standards that don't work together, making machine automation more complicated than it needs to be. Our mission? To change that.
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Frequently asked questions
OPC UA FX and OPC UA over TSN are essentially the same technology, although the naming has evolved over time. OPC UA FX is now the official name used by the OPC Foundation. Although TSN (Time-Sensitive Networking) is not explicitly mentioned in the name, it remains a fundamental part of the OPC UA FX technology stack. The abbreviation "UAFX" may be used after the full name is introduced.
C2C stands for Controller-to-Controller and C2D stands for Controller-to-Device. These are two phases during the development of the OPC UA FX specification. The C2C specification was completed in 2022 and provides standardized communication between controllers. Work is currently underway on the C2D specification, which builds on the concepts of C2C and extends them to field-device-specific use cases such as motion controllers, sensors and actuators.
Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) is an integral part of OPC UA FX. It provides deterministic, real-time communication for OPC UA, enabling precise synchronization across machines and devices from multiple vendors. OPC UA securely structures data and adds semantics, while TSN provides the deterministic "network highway" that allows this structured data to travel predictably. Without the interoperability of OPC UA FX, integrating devices from different vendors would require costly and inflexible custom development.
IEC/IEEE 60802 is a joint IEC and IEEE effort to define a unified Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) profile tailored for industrial automation. The IEC60802 TSN profile for industrial automation standardizes the specific TSN features and parameters-such as traffic shaping, scheduling and time synchronization. This is needed to achieve deterministic, interoperable communication between diverse devices. By ensuring reliability and low latency, it supports demanding operational technology requirements in multi-vendor environments. IEC/IEEE 60802, expected to be published by the end of 2025, also underpins OPC UA FX, providing the foundation for scalable, real-time automation solutions based on next-generation industrial communications standards.
OPC UA standards are managed by the OPC Foundation, while TSN standards are defined by the IEEE 802.1 working group. To harmonize the OPC UA and TSN standards for industrial automation, the OPC Foundation launched the Field Level Communications initiative, led by Peter Lutz. This initiative involves collaboration among leading industry vendors to establish vendor-independent, interoperable communication standards for various industrial automation applications such as I/O, motion control and safety.
Yes, OPC UA FX includes comprehensive built-in cybersecurity features that are essential for compliance with regulations such as the Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) and the NIS2 directive. OPC UA FX meets and exceeds IEC 62443 cybersecurity standards, providing essential security features such as access control, user rights management, encryption and more. This significantly exceeds the capabilities of legacy fieldbus technologies.
OPC UA FX technology can handle networks with more than 10,000 nodes and supports scalable communication speeds from 10 Mbps to 10 Gbps and beyond. In performance tests conducted by B&R, OPC UA FX achieved cycle times of less than 50 microseconds with jitter of less than ±100 nanoseconds in a network of 200 remote I/O bus couplers with 10,000 I/O points. This performance eliminates the need for proprietary fieldbus solutions and allows high-performance motion control and bandwidth-intensive IT traffic to coexist seamlessly.
OPC UA FX supports all commonly used industrial network topologies, including line, star, tree and ring configurations. TSN also provides standardized mechanisms for seamless real-time redundancy through cable redundancy, ring or mesh topologies.
Yes, TSN is fully backward compatible with standard Ethernet, allowing TSN devices, non-TSN OPC UA devices, and standard IP-based Ethernet devices to coexist on the same network without the need for additional gateways or interfaces. However, only TSN-enabled devices benefit from real-time deterministic communication.
Yes, synchronization between OPC UA FX and POWERLINK devices is supported within B&R automation systems, enabling smooth integration and migration paths.
B&R already offers products labeled "OPC UA FX". Fully conformance-tested OPC UA FX products are expected to be available during 2025. Contact your preferred suppliers for detailed information about their specific commercialization plans.