Patent 7031168 was granted and assigned to Omron on April, 2006 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
Module substrates each having the functions of input, power supply, and output/communication corresponding to the required model are attached to a base substrate having shared bus wiring. Thus, a main CPU of an input module can discriminate the respective module substrates to perform the control operation corresponding to the model, thereby sharing the module substrates among different models.