EtherCAT-based platform for distributed control in high-performance industrial applications

Industrial Ethernet is gradually becoming pervasive in the automation field. EtherCAT is one such technology, combining high real-time performance with a rich functionality set. Besides that, EtherCAT offers short cycle times, accurate time synchronization, redundancy and high data throughput. Most EtherCAT applications are in the 500-1000μs domain. There are only few EtherCAT master implementations in the sub-100 or sub-50μs range for high-performance applications. This paper presents EtherCAT based distributed controller which is capable of less than 30μs cycle times and was implemented on P2020 processor. Total HW and SW overhead per cycle is 9.6μs including jitter of 5μs. Achieved preciseness of the distributed time is below 20ns. The stack was designed to be modular and also reused on different platforms.