Features

EtherCAT (Ethernet Control Automation Technology) is a series of Ethernet-based industrial communication buses. It has established the mainstream in the industrial automation industry pursuing high precision, high efficiency, and low cost due to its high-speed communication performance and instant communication system.

EtherCAT is industrial Ethernet

The optimized EtherCAT data is included in the IEEE 802.3 Ethernet frame. The frame travels through the media at 100 Mbps in full-duplex mode.

Flexible Topologies

With two EtherCAT ports on all devices, no additional switches are required to create a linear network. EtherCAT junction slaves can be used to build tree and star topologies.

Distributed Clocks

The EtherCAT node slave measures the time difference between incoming and returning frame - timestamp-. With these
timestamps the master can determine the propagation delay offset to the individual slave accurately. This mechanism ensures accurate synchronization between devices with less than 1 μs jitter.

Simple cabling

100Base-TX EtherCAT uses standard 100BASE-TX Ethernet
communication very effi ciently, over standard shielded Ethernet cables and connectors. No need for network switches.

Easy use, easy connect

When compared to a classic fieldbus system, EtherCAT is the obvious choice: node addresses can be set automatically, there’s no need for network tuning, and onboard diagnostics with fault localization make
pinpointing errors a snap. Despite these advanced features, EtherCAT is also easier to use than Industrial Ethernet: there are no switches to configure, and no complicated handling of MAC or IP addresses is required.

Processing on the fly