mvPMC-eCAT Master PCI Board

The mvPMC-eCAT board is a “mezzanine card” in PMC-PCI format that allows the host to handle up to 2 EtherCAT fieldbuses in master mode; at 100Mbaud speed, with I/O cycles that can be shorter than 50uSec, data can be fetched from DP Ram without wasting CPU time.

Furthermore, using its PCI Agent modality, the board can move data directly into Host's memory, increasing its performance. Communication can be redundant thanks to the two FastEthernet Controllers (FCC) integrated in the Freescale PowerQUICC II embedded µProcessor.

Why to use an added board instead of running a Software Master (Ma.Vi. produced a SW Master program both under VxWorks and under Linux O.S.) to drive the EtherCAT slaves? If you need to process a lot of data (Kbytes), at cycle time very short (less than 500µs) and you have a PC based system sometimes it is useful to have an added µProcessor to manage at high speed your remote devices, and let your system to calculate process data.

The board will be soon available in PCI and PCIexpress format.

Multiple communication and control programs have been developed on the same mvPMC card (under a reduced eCos O.S. Kernel), for distributed real time data management, with Ethernet Deterministic protocol (Ma.Vi.‘s EtherARC).

Ma.Vi. has developed also an I/O Slave EtherCAT modular system mvTBI (Terminal Board Intelligenti).