A Gigabit Real-time Ethernet for Manufacture Automation Control

摘要

In order to meet the requirements of communication bandwidth in the field of high-speed and high-precision motion control, a real-time Ethernet communication solution based on Gigabit Ethernet, Gigabit-EtherMAC, is proposed. This solution employs master/slave structure and the slave node based on field programmable gate array (FPGA) manages the communication cycle, which greatly reduces the real-time demand for the master node. In this paper, a summation frame cut-through mechanism is employed to reduce communication cycle. A relative distributed clock mechanism is also proposed to realize accurate synchronization between slave nodes. Experiments show that the communication period is stable, the forwarding delay of slave nodes can be as low as 384 nanoseconds, and the synchronization jitter of slave node is less than 100 nanoseconds when the standard PC is employed as the master node.