An FPGA based slave communication controller for Industrial Ethernet

In the paper, an FPGA (field-programmable-gate-array) based Industrial Ethernet slave communication controller is proposed. The slave communication controller is compatible with a custom communication protocol and will be used in NC (Numerical Control) system. A distributed clock which is integrated in the slave controller and synchronizes to the system clock provides a precise time for each device in the network. The slave communication controller is implemented on Xilinx Spartan3E XC3S500E with a maximum communication delay of about 1000ns.