BECKHOFF EtherCAT Technology Section I - Manual (Page 21)

EtherCAT Slave Controller Overview
Slave Controller – Technology I-1
1 EtherCAT Slave Controller Overview
An EtherCAT Slave Controller (ESC) takes care of the EtherCAT communication as an interface
between the EtherCAT fieldbus and the slave application. This document covers the following
Beckhoff ESCs: ASIC implementations (ET1100, ET1200), functionally fixed binary configurations for
FPGAs (ESC20), and configurable IP Cores for FPGAs (ET1810/ET1815).
Table 1: ESC Main Features
Feature ET1200 ET1100 IP Core ESC20
Ports 2-3 (each
EBUS/MII,
max. 1xMII) 2-4 (each
EBUS/MII) 1-3 MII/
1-3 RGMII/
1-2 RMII 2 MII
FMMUs 3 8 0-8 4
SyncManagers 4 8 0-8 4
RAM [Kbyte] 1 8 0-60 4
Distributed Clocks 64 bit 64 bit 32/64 bit 32 bit
Process Data Interfaces
Digital I/O 16 bit 32 bit 8-32 bit 32 bit
SPI Slave Yes Yes Yes Yes
8/16 bit µController - Async/Sync Async Async
On-chip bus - - Yes -
The general functionality of an ESC is shown in Figure 1:
ECAT
Processing
Unit
AutoForwarder +
Loopback
SyncManager
FMMU
ESC address space
User RAM Registers Process RAM
EEPROM
Distributed
Clocks
Monitoring Status
Reset
PHY
Management
Reset
SYNC LEDs I²C EEPROM
PHY MI
SPI / µC parallel /
Digital I/O / On-chip bus
0 1 2 3
Ports (Ethernet/EBUS)
LATCH
PDI
ECAT Interface PDI Interface
Figure 1: EtherCAT Slave Controller Block Diagram