Field Buses

Need an industry standard communications solution?  Need to talk to PLCs or industrial PCs?  A field bus is the solution for you.  ELMG provides two field bus solutions: Powerlink and Ethercat.

Why Powerlink and Ethercat?

The first point of commonality between these two buses is that they are both industrial Ethernet solutions.  In these modern times, the Ethernet based solutions have replaced the serial bus (such as RS485) based solutions such as Profibus and Modbus.   The second point they have in common is that they are low latency compared with others such as Profinet and Ethernet/IP.  This is because they have based their solution not on TCP/IP but on custom transport and data link layers.  This means Profinet and Ethernet/IP are burdened with the long latencies of TCP.  PowerLink and Ethercat do not have TCP so do not have the latency issue.

If you need another bus don’t worry if part of your system uses SERCOS or Profinet, or even a serial field bus, there are third-party products that can convert between pretty much any different field buses to allow your diverse system to function smoothly.

Powerlink and Ethercat are both good solutions and each has its own strengths and weaknesses.  The field bus that is right for you will be application dependent and ELMG can help determine which would suit your application better.

Additional Services

As well as providing a full field bus solution, ELMG can help determine what data needs to be sent across the bus and how minimize latency.  ELMG can also assist in analysis of your control loop to determine the maximum latency that is tolerable before your control loop is too adversely affected.