EtherCAT Design Service for FPGA

EtherCAT allows very high performance on the communication level. Softing Industrial Automation offers an EtherCAT solution based on Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs), providing IP Cores and technology to carry this EtherCAT advantage further to the application level. The provided flexibility of this solution allows the implementation of a wide range of hardware architectures.

In addition, Softing provides ready-to-use evaluation packages for various Altera FPGA evaluation boards. These packages can be downloaded from Softing's website. The evalution packages contain ready-to-use designs, a sample application, a PLC program to interact with the sample application, comprehensive documentations as well as project files and hardware and software source files as starting point for customer specific developments. Thus, the evaluation components provide an ideal starting point for integration projects performed by the device manufacturer. Integration workshops performed by Softing allow for a smooth project launch and optimize the efficiency of the customer’s project work.

Making use of its highly qualified and committed software and hardware engineers, Softing is also capable to perform customer-specific integration projects transforming individual requirements into operational devices. The set of services offered by Softing include IP Core and stack integration, adaptation of the EtherCAT Slave Core and the communication stack to individual customer requirements as well as development and manufacturing of FPGA-based EtherCAT hardware.