News

SPS/IPC/DRIVES 2011 | Review: ETG Joint Booth Highlights

Thanks to the active support of its members, ETG was well represented at SPS/IPC/DRIVES 2011 tradeshow showing the unique technology highlights as well as the great product variety of EtherCAT.

This year over 270 (!) different devices were shown from 65 co-exhibitors on new designed product walls, demonstrating the acceptance of the technology not only within the EtherCAT community. With more than 130 master vendors, over 90 drive vendors and across 66 I/O vendors, EtherCAT not only emphasizes its leading position on the Industrial Ethernet market, but also shows the broad support of the technology and thus leading to a huge assortment of products for users of the technology, such as machine builders, OEM or system integrators.

However, not only the number of products is increasing every day: With more than 1850 members worldwide since the foundation of ETG in 2003, ETG is still monitoring a continuous positive trend for new membership applications, especially from Asia and North America.

Among the product variety, the world record multi-axis presenter and the EtherCAT system architecture wall, another other hot topics was addressed: Safety products are available for EtherCAT since 2005 and a functional demo shows the exchange of safe data between safety devices from several companies.

We’ve made a two-part video highlighting EtherCAT features and products by means of the booth. Take a tour through the booth, commented by Martin Rostan (Executive Director ETG), here:
Highlight Video 1
Highlight Video 2

ETG Membership Assembly: Besides the ETG Joint Booth the annual ETG Membership Assembly took place in the evening right after the show hours of the first day. The introductory and main part was presented by Martin Rostan, Executive Director ETG, including ETG membership development, ETG activities worldwide and EtherCAT market situation, to name a few. Dr. Guido Beckmann, Chairman ETG Technical Committee, gave an overview over the work and the achievements of the various Technical Working Groups. He also informed about recent updates of EtherCAT technical documents and specifications. ETG members can download the slides and minutes within the download section:
Membership Assembly Files

ETG Press Conference: At the ETG Press Conference during the tradeshow ETG introduced a new concept standardizing plant-wide Safety architecture for heterogeneous control networks. Furthermore the EtherCAT chip from Texas Instruments is available now, enabling standard microcontroller for EtherCAT communication. In addition, Beckhoff now offers ETG members the most widely-used EtherCAT Slave Stack Code for free. ETG member company Aixtron stated their support of the new ETG Semiconductor Technical Working Group, backed by the market-leading semiconductor equipment vendors. See press section for details:
Press Section