To address the complexity of integrating industrial communications, TI has pursued a programmable approach. Instead of using an ASIC or an FPGA to enable communications function, TI has designed a PRU based Industrial Communications Subsystem with the goal of using single hardware to support the various fieldbus systems. In this architecture, the PRUs are programmed to support the media access layer or Layer 2 of respective Fieldbus standard and provide a single interface to the higher layer software running on the ARM processor. On the other end, the PRUs are connected to MII and UART interfaces that are coupled with Ethernet PHY or RS-485 transceivers on the board. In this manner, this fully integrated solution with the microprocessor and the transceiver can serve more than one communications standard just by replacing the firmware. There are several advantages of this approach, first, significant cost and complexity reduction can be achieved by not using a dedicated ASIC, hardware development time and effort is reduced, same device has scalable performance variants with associated price advantages to cost effectively address varying performance needs with lower investment in product development.