Genius I-O

The industrial modules that are found in the GE Fanuc Genius I-O series are designed to work with IBM PCs. These modules are known as IBM PC interface modules or PCIMs for short. The Genius I-O modules can be controlled by the IBM PCs or by PLCs or programmable logic controllers. The modules in this series come with the basic PCIM motherboard and daughterboard, a serial bus, I/O blocks, and a handheld monitor. The I/O blocks in the Genius I-O modules are used for diagnostics and troubleshooting. They can detect errors and problems that ordinary PLCs cannot such as short circuits, open circuits, and overloads.

The daughterboard in the GE Fanuc Genius I-O modules is similar to a Series Six PLC Bus controller, and it usually handles general-purpose I/O control applications and controls all the devices on the Genius Serial Bus. This daughterboard can communicate with the other devices on the Genius Serial Bus through background messaging and it can perform initialization and fault management tasks for up to 30 of these devices at a time. The motherboard in the GE Fanuc Genius I-O modules acts as an interface between a host system that is IBM-compatible and a daughterboard with Open Architecture. The PCIM motherboard is a 2-layer board while the PCIM daughterboard is a 4-layer board. All of the data that is shared between the Genius I-O PCIM and the host system passes through the host-shared RAM which is known as the SRI or the shared RAM interface.