The Year of the CAT

Martin Rostan is Executive Director of the EtherCAT Technology Group (ETG), the organization charged with advancing and promoting the EtherCAT industrial Ethernet network originally developed by Beckhoff Automation. CE Asia caught up with him on his recent visit to the region.

CE Asia: What is the reason behind your trip to Asia?

Rostan: Although EtherCAT was invented in Europe, the EtherCAT Technology Group is a global organization with members all over the world. I travel to Asia frequently as there is a lot of interest in EtherCAT in this part of the world. For this trip, ETG had a booth at the Factory Automation Asia exhibition in Shanghai and so I was there, and I am in Singapore to give some seminars to business associates of TDS Technology, who have come from all over Southeast Asia to be here.

CE Asia: As well as leading the ETG organization you are Head of Technology Marketing for Beckhoff Automation. Do you see any conflict there?

Rostan: Beckhoff is the one that invented EtherCAT and it certainly is the driving force behind it. But what is very important is that the company is definitely not preventing others from implementing the technology. Beckhoff may in fact lose accounts to companies having the same technology, but can win many more that it could not if it was just offering a proprietary bus technology. Essentially, Beckhoff believes – lives and breathes, you can even say – in open technologies.

CE Asia: The current battle between the various industrial Ethernets seems somewhat reminiscent of the “fieldbus wars” a decade ago. Would you agree?

Rostan: There is a similarity in that there are competing technologies, but a big difference is that the fieldbus wars were fought around standardization – with the aim of one fieldbus becoming the single standard, which in the end was just not possible. People now realize you cannot have one network as the standard. For industrial Ethernet, within five years, I believe we will have just three significant networks: Profinet; EtherCAT; EtherNet/ IP; plus ModbusTCP for non real-time applications. Competition is good; it drives us all to build better technology. However, it should be fair – people should argue with verifiable facts and not just bash each other.

CE Asia: The perception of EtherCAT is that it is a high speed network that delivers real-time performance. Is this correct?

Rostan: It is a fast network, and for many applications this is the decisive factor. But there are other important features, especially its cost advantage and its flexible topology advantage. And unlike Profinet or EtherNet/IP, you do not need an underlying device level bus like Profibus or DeviceNet. EtherCAT provides the best of both worlds – the simplicity, low cost and high performance of fieldbus, and the connectivity and Internet technologies provided by Ethernet and TCP/IP.

CE Asia: Is EtherCAT relevant for process automation?

Rostan: We do have a growing number of members with an interest in the process industry, but I cannot say we have a short term goal to conquer that market, although I do see opportunity for EtherCAT in non intrinsically safe sectors like food and beverage. Apart from factory automation, which has been the main focus so far, I think the next big market for the network will be building automation.

CE Asia: What do you see as the future for EtherCAT?

Rostan: It looks very positive. Given the short lifespan of the network, the success so far has been overwhelming. If you had told me three years ago I would be flying to Asia to give EtherCAT seminars I would not have believed you!

The technology is very convincing – the processing on the fly, the efficient way of using Ethernet for machine control. And ETG members recognize that it is a truly open technology and that they have access to everything.

In Asia, the three countries currently most active with EtherCAT are Japan, Korea, and China. But it is really starting to take off here in Southeast Asia and I am confident we can win more customers. This is a forward looking region and one known for adopting new technologies fairly easily. We will see a lot of EtherCAT networks here very soon.