Siemens

This is a quick review of Siemens TIA Portal v11, as released in may 2011.
It is based on TIA Portal with STEP7 Professional and WinCC Professional.
This review is by no means “complete”. It is the result of testing during 3-4 days.
Overall about TIA Portal.
TIA Portal is supposed to encompass all Siemens Simatic software products.
At the moment there are some holes in the line-up.
Lacking are the following:
Integration with DRIVES.
Safety.
S7-300 T CPUs.
S7-400 H CPUs.
WinCC redundancy.
CFC.
As to the S7 programming, it is worth noting that the new S7-1200 platform uses a different strategy compared to the older S7-300/400 platform. The programs for S7-1200 are compiled to machine-near instructions, whereas the programs for S7-300/400 are compiled to MC7 code. This means to end-users, that the instruction set for S7-1200 and S7-300/400 are not 100% identical. Also, when a programming functionality is released for one platform it isn’t necessarily released for the other platform. For example is the programming language SCL available for S7-300/400, but not for S7-1200. SCL for S7-1200 should be released at a later time.
It has been rumored that S7-300/400 will change to the same program strategy as S7-1200 sometime in the future. This will be logical so that there will be one uniform programming platform from top to bottom. TIA Portal requires a hefty computer. It does not run very fast on my average specified machine with
2GB RAM.
Starting a major activity, such as inserting an entire station, takes 20-30 seconds.
More irritatingly is that there is a minute delay for every activity in the editors that are used for coding the programs.
Also, the software has so many windows, menus, side-menus, tabs and sub-tabs, that you absolutely must have a large screen, and preferably two screens.
The next pages shows examples of some of the screens in TIA Portal.

The Devices and Networks view:

The LAD editor view:

The SCL editor view: