Development of EtherCAT Slave Based on Multi-Core DSP

Abstract

We develop a hardware and software for EtherCAT slave based on multi-core DSP in order to apply to control applications. Beckhoff's ET1100 ASIC is employed as EtherCAT slave controller; EtherCAT slave stack and control application algorithm are processed by individually assigned DSP core; and data interexchange between the two DSP cores is carried out by using the Inter-Process Communication mechanism. Namely, we intentionally separate the EtherCAT communication stack process from control application process using multi-core DSP, which enables to achieve conducting complicated control application as well as high-speed communication cycle. The high performance of the developed EtherCAT slave are demonstrated by real experiments using EtherCAT network composed of the developed slave and IgH EtherCAT master for Linux.