Machinery Safety

This covers the machinery side of functional safety: guarding, light curtains, emergency stops, and safe drive functions, designed to ISO 13849-1 or IEC 62061. Where the process world grades a safety function by SIL, machinery grades it by performance level (PL), and the category of the control system caps how high that can go. If you work on the process side, these terms tend to show up on packaged equipment that ships with its own machine safety controls.