Nuremberg, Germany, December 18, 2023 – The EtherCAT Technology Group (ETG) is celebrating its 20th anniversary. The global organization launched with 33 founding members at the SPS exhibition in Nuremberg in November 2003. From the very beginning, the aim of the group has been to promote EtherCAT technology worldwide, with the belief that everyone should be able to use and implement EtherCAT.
Since the beginning, the ETG has brought together a diverse community, including machine builders, suppliers of advanced control technology and end users from wide-ranging industries. This has ensured that EtherCAT is ideal for use in a wide range of applications. With qualified expert user feedback, the ETG system partners have enabled integration and interoperability of hardware and software components in all required device classes. Soon, universities and research institutes from around the world joined and started using EtherCAT for research projects and curriculum.
The ETG quickly grew to become the world's largest fieldbus association. In the first five years, membership surpassed 1,000, encompassing companies, universities and organizations. (Only groups, not individuals, are permitted to join the ETG.) Growth accelerated even further, reaching 3,000 in 2014 and then 5,000 in 2018. Today, the association has almost 7,500 members from 74 countries and continues to grow at a rapid rate of roughly 500 new members every year.
Founded and based in Nuremberg, ETG established offices in the U.S., China, Japan and South Korea as early as 2007. ETG Conformance Test Centers were opened in 2009. Right from the start, the ETG has supported its members with numerous free workshops, development software and support in implementing the technology. The EtherCAT Plugfests are also very popular: to date, the ETG has held a total of 59 of these multi-day developer meetings to test device interoperability in Europe, Asia and North America.
In the numerous technical working groups, ETG members continue to advance EtherCAT in a backward-compatible manner and without changing the underlying functional principle. As such, EtherCAT is still on version 1.0, and today's devices can be used in systems from 2004 without any problems.
In 2005, Safety over EtherCAT was added to the technology standard. This FSoE (Fail Safe over EtherCAT) extension meets the requirements of IEC 61508 and IEC 61784, integrates safety-critical communication into the system, and is suitable for applications up to SIL 3. Safety over EtherCAT is also stable: as the only industrial Ethernet safety protocol, it did not have to change to meet the increased requirements of the more stringent standards.
EtherCAT P (EtherCAT + Power) is an extension of the EtherCAT technology for cabling. Introduced in 2016, it enables the four-wire standard Ethernet cable to accommodate two electrically isolated, individually switchable 24 V/3 A supplies. The ability to cascade several EtherCAT devices means just one cable can supply power and communication to field devices.
With EtherCAT G, the next fully backward-compatible technology expansion is at the starting block. EtherCAT G extends the application spectrum of EtherCAT to devices with particularly high bandwidth requirements without replacing the robust and proven 100 Mbit/s technology.
Making the technology fully open to the market not only led to association specifications but also to numerous national and international standards. EtherCAT and Safety over EtherCAT are international IEC standards, national standards in China and South Korea, SEMI standards for the semiconductor industry, and the ETG is an official standardization partner of IEC and IEEE.
The ETG promotes EtherCAT technology by actively supporting the many device manufacturers and by participating in seminars and trade shows around the world. To date, the ETG has held 175 roadshows in more than 50 countries and has presented the technology at well over 200 trade shows.
In 2023, to mark the 20th anniversary of the technology, the ETG published node figures for the first time. Not counting modular devices such as I/O terminals, almost 60 million EtherCAT chips were sold by the end of 2022, only counting multi-protocol chips according to EtherCAT market share. As such, the more than 3,500 EtherCAT device manufacturers have delivered ETG the biggest 20th anniversary present of all – very likely making EtherCAT the most widely used industrial Ethernet technology in the world.
https://www.ethercat.org
