Patent ID: 8612920

Claim:
A field device for determining or monitoring a physical or chemical variable, comprising: a sensor, which works according to a defined measuring principle; and a control/evaluation unit, which, as a function of a required safety standard for a particular safety-critical application, conditions and evaluates along at least two equivalent measuring paths measurement data delivered by said sensor, wherein: said control/evaluation unit is implemented on an application-specific integrated circuit—an ASIC—which, in at least a first section and in a second section, is embodied as a dynamically reconfigurable logic chip; in each of the two sections, in each case, a measuring path, which is composed of a plurality of function modules, can be configured; the individual sections are spaced apart from one another in such a manner, that a temperature and/or a voltage change in one of the sections has no influence on any other section; said control/evaluation unit partially dynamically reconfigures the function modules in the measuring paths as a function of the particular, defined; and the distance between two neighboring sections is greater than the channel length of transistors or size of structural elements, from which the application-specific integrated circuit, the ASIC, is constructed.