The Fieldbus Foundation is an organization dedicated to a single international, interoperable fieldbus standard. It was established in September 1994 by a merger of WorldFIP North America and the Interoperable Systems Project (ISP). The Fieldbus foundation is a not-for-profit corporation that consists of more than 350 of the world's suppliers and end users of process control and manufacturing automation products.[1] Working together these companies have made contributions to the IEC/ISA fieldbus standards development.
Unlike proprietary network protocols, Foundation fieldbus is not owned by a company, it is an open, interoperable [fieldbus] that is based on the International Organization for Standardization's Open Systems Interconnection (OSI/ISO) seven-layer communications model. The Foundation specification is compatible with the officially sanctioned SP50 standards project of the Instrumentation, Systems, and Automation Society (ISA) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC).