Spatial-temporal communication redundancy for high performance EtherCAT master
Tatsuya Maruyama, Tsutomu Yamada · 2017
We present a highly reliable communication architecture for an EtherCAT master in keeping with the trend of using Industrial Ethernet in real applications. Our EtherCAT master achieves fast retransmission using a working counter (WKC) and communication redundancy by automatically switching internal path connections. These functions enable highly accurate cyclic communications with high reliability. We prototyped the proposed EtherCAT master on a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) (50 MHz operating frequency) suitable for an embedded system and evaluated its performance. The results showed that the master can retransmit 64-byte frames within a 50 μs period and synchronize slaves within 1 μs accuracy even when a communication failure occurs.