Nikon Corporation (Kazuo Ushida, President, Minato-ku, Tokyo) is pleased to announce the release of two multi-turn absolute encoders*1, the MAR-M40AS and the MAR-MK42AS, that are compliant with the IEC 61508 SIL3 functional safety standard*2. The encoders obtain position information from two independent sources and provide safety motion monitoring for on-board robots.

The encoders will be displayed at the upcoming 2015 International Robotics Exhibition at Tokyo Big Sight from 2 to 5 December.

  • *1International standard on functional safety of electrical/electronic programmable electronic safety-related systems published by the IEC (International Electrotechnical Commission), where SIL (Safety Integrity Level) indicates the system-level safety performance on a scale of SIL1 (lowest) to SIL4 (highest). The MAR-M40AS and MAR-MK42AS deliver safety performance at SIL3, the maximum safety ranking for general industrial products.
  • *2A multi-turn absolute encoder is an encoder that is capable of detecting the absolute position of the current rotation position as well as the angle within each rotation. Origin return is not required at system startup and the accurate absolute position information for the encoder is readily available.
distributed by