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Sercos III Ethernet chip buillt on FPGAs

A Xilinx product story

Edited by the Electronicstalk editorial team Apr 20, 2007

Spartan-3 FPGA-enabled Sercos III system provides a low-cost flexible alternative for industrial networking applications.

Xilinx has announced immediate availability of a Sercos (serial real-time communications system) III Ethernet product at the Hannover Messe show.

The low-cost Spartan-3 FPGA-enabled Sercos III product provides a low-cost flexible alternative for industrial networking applications.

Sercos III is supported by Sercos International, the world-wide user organisation for Sercos technology.

Both the Sercos III master and slave are hosted by a single Spartan-3 FPGA on the Xilinx industrial networking platform.

"FPGAs offer an ideal platform for the diverse requirements within industrial automation".

"The flexibility and scalability of the Spartan-3 devices provide an ideal platform for innovative and cost-efficient automation products", says Peter Lutz, Managing Director of Sercos International.

"Due to its real time capabilities and performance, the Sercos III interface has become a widely accepted Ethernet-based networking standard worldwide", says Niladri Roy, Senior Manager for ISM at Xilinx.

"The implementation of Sercos III on the Spartan-3 generation not only adds to our growing library of industrial networking IP, the solution allows for the most optimised application of Sercos III and effective cost management for a broad spectrum of customers".

Sercos III is based on the established real time mechanisms of the original Sercos interface, still using the principle of cyclic data transfer with deterministic timing.

This hardware-based synchronisation is a prerequisite for the reliable implementation of challenging motion applications, such as packaging machines, multi-axis machine tools and electronic line shafts in printing machines.

Sercos III has been defined such that any standard Ethernet frame (eg TCP/IP) can be transmitted in a non-real-time slot, in parallel to the real time processing.

Thus, Sercos III combines the established Sercos real time mechanisms and standardised parameter set with universal communications based on Industrial Ethernet.