n TECHNOLOGY July/August 2026 www.drivesncontrols.com 22 JUST MONTHS AFTER SIEMENS announced its Eigen Engineering Agent AI tool for industrial automation engineering, it has added two new capabilities – integration with ECAD (electrical computer-aided design), and standardscompliant project generation. These additions mean that the tool now extends into earlier stages of automation engineering, connecting electrical designs with software development, and turning plain-language machine descriptions into standards-compliant projects. Unlike most AI assistants which simply generate suggestions, the Eigen Engineering Agent plans, executes and validates industrial automation engineering tasks end-to-end. It understands projects, writes control software, configures systems and keeps refining its work until it meets defined quality benchmarks. This will allow automation engineers to focus on system-level decisions, says Siemens. The Agent works alongside Siemens’TIA Portal engineering software platform, and is part of its Xcelerator portfolio. The tool is already being used by more than 100 companies in 19 countries. The agent accelerates everyday engineering work such as PLC programming, HMI visualisation, and the configuration of drives, motors and encoders. Siemens says it delivers: n 2-5 times faster execution than manual workflows; n gains in engineering efficiency of up to 50%; and n 80% improvements in quality. With its extended capabilities, the Eigen Engineering Agent now understands more of the context that comes before software development, including hardware topology, machine structure and engineering intent. These capabilities move the Agent further upstream in the automation lifecycle. Currently, electrical and automation engineering happen sequentially, using different tools and different ways of describing the same machine. Electrical engineers design the wiring and hardware in ECAD tools. Automation engineers then program how the machine behaves, working from tags, function blocks and control logic. Translating from one to the other is done by hand: engineers retype lists of devices, fix mismatched names and track down late hardware changes. That takes time and creates errors. The Eigen Engineering Agent now reads electrical design files in formats such as XML and AML. It detects inconsistencies, resolves or flags them, adds devices to a TIA Portal project, configures the connections, and generates PLC tags based on the actual hardware topology. The result is said to be a faster, cleaner start to every project, and software that begins with the electrical design as built. New automation projects start the same way. Engineers break a machine down into parts, name the modules, organise the data and define how the machine moves between states. Even experienced teams can spend days doing this before they write a single line of control software. The Eigen Engineering Agent is said to turn machine descriptions into standards-compliant projects within minutes. Engineers describe the machine in plain language. The agent then generates a project that follows the Siemens’ best-practice reference for structuring TIA Portal projects. The project opens in TIA Portal, ready to build on. “Engineering teams lose time between electrical design and software and between knowing best practices and applying them,” explains Vasi Philomin, executive vice-president and head of data and AI at Siemens. “With these new capabilities, the Eigen Engineering Agent brings hardware topology, system structure and engineering intent into the automation workflow, enabling automation engineers to start from a project that already reflects the system they need to automate. This way engineers can focus more on the work that matters.” “The Eigen Engineering Agent shows what AI can deliver beyond the digital world,”adds Siemens board member, Peter Koerte, who is also the company’s chief technology officer and chief strategy officer. “It makes companies up to 50% more efficient in complex engineering work, while making the results more reliable.” Both new capabilities are now included in the standard Eigen Engineering Agent subscription at no extra cost. www.siemens.com/en-us/products/tiaportal/eigen-engineering-agent p The Greek IoT controller specialist Erqos has developed a MicroPLC that solves the problem of connecting machine-level control and industrial I/O directly to modern IP and MQTTbased systems. Conventional microPLCs were created for an era when control systems lived inside panels and needed gateways, protocol converters, or polling servers to participate in connected architectures. The new EQSP32CE brings communications directly into the controller, eliminating much of this complexity. www.erqos.com p Mitsubishi Electric and Sony Semiconductor Solutions have formed a 60:40 joint venture, Advanced Vision Solutions, which will develop vision sensors that perform AI-based analysis of visual data on board the devices. The sensors will capture conditions and changes that have traditionally been hard to visualise, and connect them to decision-making and control systems. They will also be able to integrate with other data to detect changes and conditions that cannot be identified from one type of data alone. p The UK EV motor developer, Advanced Electric Machines, has developed an aircooled, rare-earth-free integrated drive system that pairs its HDRM 150 motor with an aircooled inverter from Emsiso, eliminating the need for thermal management systems that add weight, plumbing and potential points of failure. The 700V drivetrain with a peak output above 30kW, is said to be easier to integrate and service, with no coolant circuits to maintain. p Wolfspeed has introduced two 3.3kV SiC (silicon carbide) Mosfet modules in standard packages, claimed to be faster, smaller, more efficient and resilient than any silicon device. One is a half-bridge baseplate power module for applications above 800A, that is said to deliver switching losses that are up to 42% lower than other SiC systems, and 95% lower than IGBTs. The other is a full-bridge, baseplateless design for multi-level, series-stacked or parallel converters. p California-based SiLC Technologies has announced a 4D laser area scanner that delivers sub-millimetre resolution at distances from 0.25–10m. The Eyeonic Edge device has a 40x40-degree field-of-view and can work in any lighting conditions, and with dark or shiny objects. It captures 1 million points per second and can measure the velocity of moving objects. https://silc.com p Italy’s Sfera Labs is shipping a hybrid industrial edge server that combines a Raspberry Pi 4B or 5 computer module with a RP2354 co-processor in a compact four-module DIN-rail enclosure. The Strato Pi Plus device solves the problem of how to deploy a Linux single-board computer in the field while ensuring the reliability needed for industrial uses. The server has four RS-485 interfaces and a CAN 2.0 / CAN FD bus, all isolated. https://sferalabs.cc/product/strato-pi-plus TECHNOLOGY BRIEFS Dedicated automation AI tool adds ECAD integration and project generation Siemens says that the latest additions to its Eigen Engineering Agent close the gap between electrical design and automation code
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