The design & performance analysis for real-time EtherCAT network data acquisition system

The performance of data acquisition systems has been increasing steadily to cope with the need for continuous improvement in manufacturing floor and machine efficiencies. The Ethernet network has become the most popular network in data acquisition systems to reduce media costs and achieve the higher performance. This paper presents the development of a standard network data acquisition system that is based on the communication protocol called EtherCAT. After a description of the protocols, we show the results of some tests aimed at evaluating the performances of such a network. In particular, we focus on the times necessary to transfer quantity data among slave stations.