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AM3359 GBit Ethercat support

Marc-Oliver Borck
Prodigy 20 points
Other Parts Discussed in Thread: TLK110, PROFIBUS, SN74CB3T16210, AM3359

Hi!

Is it possible to modify the TMDXICE3359 board (i.e. a newly designed custom board) with a Gbit Ethernet PHY (i.e. Vitesse VSC8641 or similar) to support Gbit EtherCAT ?

Does the  EtherCAT Industrial Communication Engine tool chain for linux provide software support for different Ethernet PHYs or could it modified to support RGMII Ethernet PHYs ?

Thanks in advance!

Best regards,

Marc-Oliver

  • 0
    TI__Mastermind 44306 points

    Marc-Oliver,

    the phys on ICE are connected to PRU MII which do not support any Gbit operation. There is no 'EtherCAT Gbit' standard (yet?)... EtherCAT works at 100Mb only.

    The current Industrial Automation SDK that is available for download and supports EtherCAT already is NOT based on Linux. However we do use Sys/Bios 6 as our RTOS. I am not aware of a Linux kernel for ICE but it shouldn't be too much work to port the BeagleBone kernel for example. There are just no fixed plans for this at TI at the moment. EtherCAT slave implementations provided by TI should be portable to other RTOS.

    The current IA-SDK should work with any MII based phy that is also compatible with EtherCAT (or even better part of the recommended list of EtherCAT phys). The basic hardware adaption layers are provided in source so if additional setup/config is required it can be done by the customer. We have no plans to test any other phys than TLK110 at the moment.

    Regards.

  • 0 in reply to Frank Walzer
    TI__Expert 3353 points

    Marc,

    Frank has good points here.. One question for you: Are you asking for EtherCAT Master or Slave? Typically, for slave implementations, a small foot-print RTOS like SYS/BIOS has many benefits in terms of system level cost and complexity.

    Thanks,

    -Srik

  • 0 in reply to Frank Walzer
    Prodigy 20 points

    Frank,

    I think I have to clarify a little bit more my requirements. We're planning a new sensor system which has to communicate with a PC over ethernet. As we will use EtherCAT as communication layer our sensor device is EtherCAT slave. 100Mbit would be sufficiant. In addition to ethernet as communication layer I also want to implement typical fieldbus interfaces like CAN or RS485 / Profibus. Doing so we can use ethernet as a free configuration port and implement a webserver for CAN or RS485 communication settings.

    For marketing purpose it would be fine if the EtherCAT / ethernet interface could also support GBit. This Gbit ethernet interface is not mantatory but it would be nice to have.  As you've mentioned 'Gbit EtherCAT' isn't standardized, but as far as I know it could might become an option in the future. In this way I asked whether we could also use a RGMII phy instead of a TLK110. Do you think I could use a low propagation delay BUS mux (SN74CB3T16210 or simiilar) to switch between the PRU MII and the RGMII of the AM3359?

    Best regards,

    Marc-Oliver

  • 0 in reply to Marc-Oliver Borck
    TI__Mastermind 44306 points

    Dear Marc-Oliver,

    yes, we could propose a solution for this. However we usually don't go into detailed customer requirements discussions on the public forum due to obvious reasons. So I suggest you contact your local TI support (may be a distributor) for a technical discussion. If you don't know anyone you can ask our hotline and you can find the contacts on the main web page.

    Regards.