EtherCAT is an extremely fast industrial automation network, which uses standard Ethernet cabling. It makes very efficient use of the standard Ethernet transmission frame, with each node accessing the entire frame on the fly. This reduces the delay in each slave to microsecond level. Its deterministic nature makes EtherCAT extremely suitable for motion control. Omron provides PLC-based as well as stand-alone motion control solutions based on EtherCAT. The GX-series I/O units provide the basic in- and outputs for such systems, including high-speed encoder inputs which can feed position information into the controller.
