Data Blocks — Why TIA Treats Data as First-Class Objects
June 1, 2026 — Article 5 of the Studying TIA Portal series. Why Data Blocks in TIA Portal are more than storage: global DBs, instance DBs, commissioning diagnostics, start values, retention, download discipline, and the ownership rules that keep shared data readable.
Function Blocks vs Functions — Code, State, and the Instance
May 25, 2026 — Article 4 of the Studying TIA Portal series. The structural difference between Function Blocks (FB) and Functions (FC) — code that remembers vs code that forgets — and how the instance data block model carries state across calls. Includes a cross-platform comparison of how Siemens TIA Portal, Beckhoff TwinCAT 3, Codesys, and SIMATIC AX implement the same IEC 61131-3 split, plus a worked example of multi-instance FB design and the two Siemens download-without-reinitialization mechanisms (per-DB memory reserve since V12, V21 "Keep actual values" for S7-1500).
