PowerLink

POWERLINK is our choice as of Standard Real-time Industrial Ethernet Network. We have acquired a serious know-how and we have the capability to quickly port this network to any FPGA, as we have done for the Altera Max10 when it became available.

Introduction

After accumulating some experience with other Industrial Networks on FPGA, we converged on retaining only POWERLINK as well as our own Ultra-Low Latency Gigabit ring.

POWERLINK is a fast real-time field bus based on standard Ethernet. openPOWERLINK is an open-source implementation of this protocol, and comes with example designs targeting Intel (previously Altera) FPGAs.

Experience

Our experience with POWERLINK was very successful :

  • We quickly mastered the POWERLINK Slave Development Kit
  • We were able to build fully working slaves on very low cost FPGA boards (including the $25 BeMicroMax10 !)
  • The interaction with the openPOWERLINK maintainers was easy and productive.
  • B&R offers a serious support for Powerlink adopters.

Take a look at this presentation to find out more details about the systems we implemented.

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