{"id":30212,"date":"2009-08-26T16:26:05","date_gmt":"2009-08-26T16:26:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.dmcinfo.com\/blog\/30212\/empowering-your-plc-with-iec-61131-3\/"},"modified":"2025-12-23T11:26:52","modified_gmt":"2025-12-23T16:26:52","slug":"empowering-your-plc-with-iec-61131-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.dmcinfo.com\/blog\/30212\/empowering-your-plc-with-iec-61131-3\/","title":{"rendered":"Empowering your PLC with IEC 61131-3"},"content":{"rendered":"

Nobody loves catchy numeric buzzwords as much as me. I – E – C – Six – Eleven – Thirty – One – Dash – Three<\/strong>…. It just rolls off the tongue! OK I admit, it's a mouthful, but trust me it's worth knowing about.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

This is a brief intro to IEC61131-3 and the first part in a series of posts that will cover its features and benefits. So what is it?<\/p>\r\n\r\n

The International Electro Technical Commission<\/a> (IEC) is a non-profit organization that develops standards for electrical and electronic technologies. They developed and published a standard (IEC 61131) in 1993 for PLCs (Programmable Logic Controllers). Part 3 of the Standard, deals with the actual way that PLCs are programmed, so it's the part that we programmers care the most about.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

Prior to the standard, every PLC manufacturer had their own proprietary means of programming their PLCs. Most were based on Ladder Logic but there was not a lot of consistency among platforms.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

The IEC created the standard as a means of providing hardware vendors with a powerful, flexible, AND CONSISTENT <\/strong>framework that standardized every aspect of a PLC program. Here are some of the main benefits:<\/p>\r\n\r\n