Twenty Protocols in One Book: IEC 61158, IEC 61784 and the Fieldbus Wars

Deep End Era. Engineering with Sankalp · Oct 28, 2026 · 1h 2m

Priya Raghavan, the OT cybersecurity architect at the Al Sahil Gas Complex, is asked to map every protocol on the site and discovers that one IEC standard number covers almost all of them, and they cannot talk to each other. Diego Ferrer, the EPC's lead control engineer, lived through the end of the fieldbus wars and explains how it happened: two decades of national rivalry, a standards committee that could not agree, and a compromise that put every contender into one enormous document. Along the way: what a fieldbus actually is, what "CPF 1" and "CP 3/2" mean on a datasheet, how to design a…