KPA EtherCAT Slave Stack is a software stack designed to minimize time-to-market for companies interested in becoming a part of dynamically increasing EtherCAT market. It is designed to run on various microcontrollers, central processing units (CPUs) or digital signal processors (DSPs) with an operating system or without it. KPA EtherCAT Slave Stack is provided as a source code or a compiled library.

Meets EtherCAT standards

KPA EtherCAT Slave Stack supports all features defined in the EtherCAT standards. Each new version is verified with the latest released and all internal versions of the EtherCAT Conformance Test Tool (CTT), as koenig-pa GmbH is a member of the Technical Working Group Conformance.

EtherCAT functions:

  • Mailbox protocols: CoE, EoE, FoE, SoE VoE
  • Distributed Clocks (DC)
  • Different scan rates

Portability

KPA EtherCAT Slave Stack may be presented as a software stack with an embedded Hardware Abstraction Layer (typically implemented through OSAL and driver part), which can be used for simple support of any EtherCAT ASIC and communication interface (PDI) between ASIC and a microcontroller.

Interfaces

  • Compatible with any Beckhoff EtherCAT Slave Controllers (ESC):
    • ASIC ET 1xxx
    • IP-Core
  • IRQ-handling of hardware events
  • Polling of mailbox and Process Image
  • Static Object Dictionary (OD) with pointer given from application
  • Supporting Intel- and Motorola-data formats

Optimized memory usage for embedded platforms

The amount of RAM used depends on the application design and the size of the Object Dictionary (OD). For example, in case of a static OD usage (a build based on source code):

RAM size:

>= 3 KB for Basic package
>= 8 KB for Standard package

ROM (flash) size:

>= 55 KB for Basic package
>= 64 KB for Standard package

Moreover, to minimize the final size of the application, KPA EtherCAT Slave Stack can be customized by editing the configuration file. For example, it is possible to deactivate Mailbox EoE, Mailbox VoE and Mailbox FoE.

Ready-to-use solutions

On the basis of the KPA EtherCAT Slave Stack various EtherCAT slaves are implemented.

KPA EtherCAT Slave Stack may include ready-to-use solutions for specific platforms and operating systems such as:

Platforms:

  • SAB 80x16x (Infineon)
  • XMC4800 (Infineon)
  • MicroBlaze (Xilinx)
  • Sitara AM335x with integrated ESC in PRUs (Texas Instruments)
  • C2000 (Texas Instruments)
  • STM32 (ST)
  • NIOS II (Intel FPGA/Altera)
  • ARM 3 – 9, ATmega128 (Atmel)
  • PPC 52xx, MPC8536 (Freescale)

Operating systems:

  • Linux (with/without RT-Preemption patch)
  • Linux with Xenomai
  • QNX
  • SYS BIOS
  • VxWorks
  • Windows
  • INtime
  • RTX/RTX64
  • OS-less

  KPA EtherCAT Slave Stack Flyer

KPA EtherCAT Slave Stack Development Kit (SSDK) is a complete tool chain containing the KPA Slave Stack itself, KPA EtherCAT Studio and KPA EtherCAT Master for Windows and other types of OS. Also, within SSDK koenig-pa provides the samples demonstrating various PDI usage.

  KPA EtherCAT Slave Stack Development Kit

KPA EtherCAT Slave Stack

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