EtherCAT, a real-time Industrial Ethernet protocol originally developed by Beckhoff Automation GmbH, excels in real-time performance and topology flexibility.

Texas Instruments is making it easier to implement EtherCAT with "a new reference design" that helps ease the development of EtherCAT slave nodes. The reference design -- an add-on card with multiple interface options -- demonstrates how to connect a high performance, dual-core C2000™ Delfino™ MCU to Beckhoff's ET1100 slave controller ASIC.

Each CPU core on the MCU provides 32-bit floating-point-processing capabilities at 200 MHz, and dual real-time control accelerators (CLAs) also running at 200 MHz each. Each C28x CPU is augmented by its own trigonometric math unit (TMU) accelerator that provides hardware-based acceleration useful for control-based tasks.

In an industrial drive application one CPU + CLA + TMU can be used to implement control-side functionality; i.e., the torque loop. The other CPU + CLA + TMU can be used to implement the application side of the system; i.e., tracking speed and position, computing trajectories, comparing motion profiles and so on.