Stefan Schönegger, Ethernet POWERLINK Standardization Group
Wolfgang Seiss, Ethernet POWERLINK Standardization Group

Industrial Ethernet today is designed to provide smallest refresh rates of actors and sensors as well as highly precise synchronization of network nodes. In most cases this is achieved by avoiding the usage of standard Ethernet implementation for Master and/or Slave devices and therefore using dedicated HW for synchronization and performance reasons. POWERLINK offers the possibility to make use of standard IEEE802.3 Ethernet components while at the same time offering high end performance results. This paper should show the achievable synchronization performance for sensors and drives by using an open source POWERLINK master and Real-time Linux on a standard PC with standard Ethernet controller.