EtherCAT Compendium

The EtherCAT Compendium will provide a comprehensive, coherent description of EtherCAT with its

• technical details,
• system, implementation, and user aspects.

It ranges from the formal specifications while also referencing to the relevant parts, to the well readable, applicable and application know-how.

The EtherCAT Compendium aims at generally interested readers, developers, and support engineers, as well as test engineers, students, and academics of ETG members.

The EtherCAT Compendium is organized in several sections. The first chapters which are published are part of the section “Technology details”. Other sections which will follow are “EtherCAT introduction”, “System aspects”, “Implementation aspects” and “User aspects”.

Individual chapters are published one by one until they will form the complete EtherCAT Compendium.

New chapters will be published continuously. The latest version of the EtherCAT Compendium can be downloaded via the link on the right hand side (member login required). The date of publication is used to identify the EtherCAT Compendium version.

Section I: EtherCAT introduction

Section II: Technology details

• EtherCAT Device Protocol technology basics
• Physical layer and cabling
• Data link layer (DLL)
• SubDevice Information Interface (SII)
• Distributed Clocks
• Interrupts
• EtherCAT State Machine
• Explicit Device Identification
• Application Layer Protocol
• Process Data Communication
• Indicators, labeling, marking rules
• Device profiles
• Safety over EtherCAT
• EtherCAT SubDevice Information
• EtherCAT Automation Protocol

Section III: System aspects

• MainDevice and configuration
• Performance
• Explicit Device Identification
• Hot Connect
• Cable redundancy
• Error handling
• EtherCAT P
• MainDevice redundancy

Section IV: Implementation aspects

• MainDevice implementation
• SubDevice implementation
• Licence
• Conformance

Section V: User aspects