EtherCAT solutions provide multiprotocol advantage

Innovasic has announced its fido5200 REM Switch chip and the RapID Platform Network Interface now fully support EtherCAT, and both have been certified to the latest version of the EtherCAT conformance test tool. Both solutions have been released to series production and are also capability of supporting PROFINET IRT, EtherNet/IP with beacon-based DLR, and ModbusTCP using the same hardware configuration. In addition, these two solutions have TSN features already built-in to their architecture allowing users keep up with emerging TSN standards. The fido5200 REM Switch chip is configured via a software driver to be a fully compliant EtherCAT Slave Controller (ESC) that supports cycle times down to 12.5µs. The RapID Platform – EtherCAT Network Interface is delivered as a module or embedded design that supports cycle times down to 1ms. Both products are available now. The fido5200 REM Switch chip provides 8 SyncManager entities, 8 FMMU entities, and resources to utilize Distributed Clocks. The Network Interface makes use of these features to support the Modular Device Profile (MDP). MDP allows easy definition of I/O modules to represent the size and type of process data for any application. In this way, the Network Interface is easily customized to represent all of the data an application produces or consumes via EtherCAT. In addition, all of the parameters defined in an MDP profile are available for access via the CAN over Ethernet (CoE) mailbox protocol, adding flexibility to the end product. The Network Interface also provides an embedded webserver so users can view network parameters and I/O data via customizable webserver content using the Ethernet over EtherCAT (EoE) mailbox protocol, says the company.