Real time industrial Ethernet solution

According to Lattice, it provides a low cost and flexible design alternative for real time industrial networking applications. Sercos III is supported by Sercos International, the worldwide user organisation for Sercos technology. Sercos is a digital bus that interconnects motion controls, drives, I/O, sensors and actuators for numerically controlled machines and systems. It is designed for the high speed serial communication of standardised closed loop real time data over Industrial Ethernet. The Sercos III real time Ethernet evaluation kit consists of two boards (fpga module and base board), plus an optional expansion module. It is designed in particular for test implementations and performance measurements of Sercos III slave devices based on the SERCON100S slave IP core in combination with the LatticeMico32 soft microprocessor and other optional system functions. The fpga module consists of a LatticeECP3-35 fpga, 8MB Flash and 8MB DRAM. Due to its dimensions, wide bus and I/O interface, the fpga module can also be integrated into Sercos III slave devices. The base board has 16DI and 16DO, all with status leds, an RS232 interface, various switches and the standardised bi-colour Sercos III diagnostic led. The board is supplied with 24Vdc or 5Vdc. A socket for expansion modules allows the addition of more functions or interfaces, such as analogue I/O. The fpga module is supported by the AUTOMATA Sercos III slave communication stack and test tools such as a master simulator for Windows XP. A sample implementation of the Sercos III I/O profile (FSP-I/O) is available. "FPGAs offer a flexible platform for the diverse requirements of industrial automation," said Peter Lutz, managing director of Sercos International. "The flexibility, scalability, low cost and low power of the innovative LatticeECP3 devices provide an ideal platform for innovative and cost efficient automation products." "The Sercos interface allows drive and control manufacturers to create intelligent digital drives with vastly improved capabilities and flexibility," added Niladri Roy, senior manager for Vertical Markets at Lattice. "The availability of Sercos III on the LatticeECP3 fpga family provides a low cost, low power fpga based alternative for a wide spectrum of customers who need to implement flexible industrial networking solutions." According to Lattice, the mid range LatticeECP3 fpga family is comprised of the lowest power, SERDES enabled fpgas in the market today. The family's five fpgas offer standards compliant, multi protocol 3.2G SERDES, DDR1/2/3 memory interfaces and high performance, cascadable dsp slices that are suitable for rf, baseband and image signal processing. Toggling at 1Gb/s, the LatticeECP3 fpgas also feature fast LVDS I/O as well as embedded memory of up to 6.8Mbits. Logic density varies from 17K LUTs to 149K LUTs with up to 586 user I/O. The LatticeECP3 fpga family is ideally suited for deployment in high volume cost and power sensitive industrial, video camera and display, wireline communications and wireless infrastructure applications.