COVID-19: A Great EtherCAT Slave IC Solution for Smart Factory

The COVID-19 pneumonia epidemic has brought a huge impact on the global manufacturing industry, but it has also given global manufacturers a new opportunity to accelerate the development of smart factory industrial automation applications.

HSINCHU, Taiwan – Apr. 15th, 2020 – The global COVID-19 pneumonia epidemic has caused the manufacturing industry, which originally relied too heavily on traditional labor-intensive production, to rethink the need to adopt more smart factory industrial automation equipment in order to reduce the possible factory shutdown risk due to excessive labor-intensive virus infection events and also improve factory production efficiency and quality. The COVID-19 pneumonia epidemic has brought a huge impact on the global manufacturing industry, but it has also given global manufacturers a new opportunity to accelerate the development of smart factory industrial automation applications.

Ethernet is the most popular and widely used network technology in the world. However, the standard Ethernet, as defined in IEEE 802.3, is non-deterministic so it is unsuitable for real-time industrial automation applications. The EtherCAT (Ethernet for Control Automation Technology) is a real-time, deterministic, high performance and open industrial Ethernet network protocol and can ensure the data transmission certainty and real-time by using a unique principle called “Processing on the fly”. The EtherCAT network can also be installed by using an existing Ethernet network environment directly so it can be implemented on an existing factory network environment much easier and cheaper. Therefore, EtherCAT is already the major industrial Ethernet communication technology used by many industrial automation equipment manufacturers.

Response to the rapidly growing global smart factory industrial automation market demand, ASIX Electronics Corporation (Taiwan Stock Exchange: 3169:Taiwan) announced the first EtherCAT slave controller in Greater China area - "AX58100 2/3-Port EtherCAT Slave Controller” in Year 2018, and announced a new generation EtherCAT Slave Controller SoC - "AX58200 2/3-Port EtherCAT Slave Controller SoC" in Year 2019. AX58x00 family EtherCAT slave product provide designers an easy-design, small package size and cost-efficient Industrial Ethernet EtherCAT slave controller solution, and is suitable for motor/motion control, digital I/O control, sensors data acquisition, robotics, EtherCAT IO-Link master, EtherCAT Junction slave module, etc. industrial automation fieldbus applications.

                                            ASIX AX58x00 Family EtherCAT Slave Controller Solutions

To simplify AX58x00 family EtherCAT product design, ASIX continuously develops different AX58x00 EtherCAT slave applications reference designs for clients’ reference such as analog/digital I/O control demo kit, motor control demo kit, etc. ASIX also offers AX58x00 evaluation boards and free Board Support Package (BSP) which includes reference schematics, PCB design guidelines, hardware/software design guides, software tools, sample firmware sources, etc. for designers to easily design the AX58x00 EtherCAT slave products.

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