Industrial Engineer · phase 5 of 16

CIP

Common Industrial Protocol, the object-oriented application protocol used by EtherNet/IP and other ODVA networks.

The Explain card

Plain English: CIP is the application protocol that EtherNet/IP, DeviceNet and ControlNet all share. It defines devices as collections of objects with attributes and services, whichever wire carries the messages.
Example: Reading a drive's output frequency is a CIP request for an attribute of the drive's motor object. The same request works whether the drive sits on EtherNet/IP or DeviceNet.
Why it matters: Because the object model is shared, tools, EDS files and diagnostics carry across networks. Understanding that a device is a set of objects turns a mysterious error code into a class, an instance and an attribute you can look up.
Hook: One vocabulary, several dialects, many cables.

How the word is built, where it came from, and what it sits beside in memory.

In a sentence

The PLC reads a remote I/O assembly over CIP before the drive enable logic is evaluated.

Letter by letter

Where it came from

Origin: an English technical initialism developed in the industrial networking community and maintained by ODVA
Entered the language: 1990s
What changed: The C originally represented Control in Control and Information Protocol, then came to represent Common as the technology expanded across multiple network families.

How it is spelled

Capitalisation: Always CIP, including mid-sentence
Plural and possessive: Normally singular and uncounted; use CIPs for multiple instances and CIP's for the possessive
Out loud: Said as a word, not spelled out.

Same family

Broken into chunks

What it sits beside

Same subject

Same shape

ODVA network technologies

CIP extensions

Phase 5: PLC Industrial Communications

The protocols that let controllers, drives and operator panels talk, plus the addressing and description files that make them agree on what was said.