Martin Rostan, Executive Director, EtherCAT Technology Group was in Sydney recently and spoke with PACE about the promise of EtherCAT and its position in the fieldbus space.
He chairs the CANopen groups inside CAN in Automation and represents Beckhoff in ODVA and in several conference program committees.
He is also the technical expert on ISO and IEC standardization committees for industrial communication.
"EtherCAT has a unique combination of unique advantages and we are by far the fastest, not only among the industrial Ethernet, but also among the fieldbus varieties, so EtherCAT is known for extremely high performance," Rostan told PACE..
"At the same time EtherCAT provides maximum topology flexibility because we're not stuck or limited to let's say the limitations of switch-based industrial Ethernet technologies. We can have all the topology combinations that we like.
"Also EtherCAT is very inexpensive. It's considered a low-cost network. We are more the Ethernet field bus also from the cost perspective. We are not needing extra infrastructure components, we just use local slave controller chips and we do not need any dedicated interface hardware in the master which makes us inexpensive.
"And it's easy to use; because we don't need the IT technologies, we don't need the IT know how to set up the network. We don't need to handle MAC addresses or IP addresses. It's even easier to use than the fieldbus network."
Here Rostan talks to PACE about the five advantages of EtherCAT over other fieldbus systems.
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