Develop an EtherCAT and DeviceNet Gateway for a Smart Factory

This paper proposes a gateway based on EtherCAT and DeviceNet for a smart factory. EtherCAT is chosen as the primary protocol and DeviceNet is used as secondary protocol. Due to its outstanding features, the gateway can support many devices and increase the quality of service (QoS) of the network. With proposal gateway, an embedded programmable logic controller (ePLC) can replace the hardware programmable logic controller. The gateway was implemented with an ARM-Cortex M3 and TwinCAT3 was used as the ePLC. Experiments show that this gateway provides a high QoS and also satisfies the real-time requirements of a factory system.