From the late 1960s to the early 1970s, the industry rushed to install larger, automated production facilities to improve productivity while reducing costs. This made the iron/steel facilities and public water treatment facilities larger in size and more complicated because of high-level automation. As a result, products with conventional structure came to face difficulties in satisfying new needs because of their insufficient capacity, function, performance and high cost.

We became aware of developing functionally-distributed hierarchical arrangement to satisfy need from the industry.

In the meanwhile, a development plan of industrial electronics component, which is a master control unit named as the “Control Pack Series”, was formulated in 1974 based on the basic principle of using microprocessor and semiconductor memory as main elements.

“Control Pack Series” was finally introduced to the market

In 1979, Yaskawa delivered the world’s first Direct Digital Control (DDC) system with an all-AC Drive using vector control AC Drives with transistors.

Later, Yaskawa’s “Control Pack series” grew up to be a model being copied after by competitors producing similar products. Still, Yaskawa could maintain its leading position among competitors, in the master control device market by occupying a market share of 100% for system’s electrical parts for domestic blast furnace plant

The period when the “Control Pack Series” started was a major turning point toward implementation of new technologies. It was the time of transition from analog line to digital circuit, the time of acquiring hardware and software techniques for use in microprocessors, and the time of creating own development environment. It was also the time when every engineer in system design, product development and system test made a unified effort in pursuing challenges and innovation.

With such technical assets left by numbers of our predecessors, the “Control Pack Series” has been passed down for generations until today.