A Development Of EtherCat Master Station For Measurement Application

Nowadays,with the continuous development of information technology,Ethernet technology has replaced the traditional test bus,and is widely used in automatic test systems because of its advantages in versatility,flexibility,and topology.Although compared with the traditional test bus,the networked test technology has obvious advantages,it still causes many system test application problems such as synchronization and real-time performance due to the defects of the network technology itself and the lack of system architecture.As one of the real-time industrial Ethernet,EtherCAT bus technology has advantages in higher bandwidth,better real-time performance,lower transmission delay,and better network compatibility,which can improve the real-time performance and synchronization performance of the test system.EtherCAT technology supports a linear network topology,which requires less cables than other structures such as the star,reducing the design cost of the test system.First of all,this paper summarizes the new requirements of the current test system,combines the actual EtherCAT system performance measurement results,analyzes the feasibility of EtherCAT technology applied to the automatic test system,proposes and compares two embedded EtherCAT development concepts based on the Xilinx Zynq-7000 development platform.The implementation scheme of the master station is based on the standards of easy implementation and system performance optimization,so an EtherCAT master station framework that PL and PS cooperate with each other in system for the test application is designed.Then,this paper analyzes the function of the embedded EtherCAT master station,divides the hardware and software functions to implement the necessary functions of the master station,and introduces the detailed funtions design.Based on the IEEE 1588 protocol,the synchronization function between the EtherCAT system and the external high-precision clock has been extended.The corresponding interface and implementation extension module were designed,and the physical hardware support was added.Then the corresponding driver and the preparation of the system test application have been also explained.Finally,this paper designs experiments for testing the function and performance of the embedded EtherCAT master station,and verifies the rationality of the master station design and the feasibility of the operation.The experimental analysis shows that the stable communication function of the EtherCAT system master station is used normally.The bandwidth,synchronization performance,and real-time performance of the system are excellent,and it meets the performance requirements of the master station for testing.