B&R and EPSG initiate partnership with Altera

B&R and the Ethernet POWERLINK Standardization Group (EPSG) announced their partnership with Altera to significantly increase interest and improve cost-effectiveness for Industrial Ethernet solutions. Based on the POWERLINK protocol standard, this partnership enables this technology for use even with low-cost sensors.  
"Our FPGA-based POWERLINK solution is an attractive offer for component manufacturers. Our partnership with Altera enables us to reduce POWERLINK solutions pricing to as low as €4, clearly beating out conventional ASIC solutions with respect to overall costs. No other real-time system can offer such an attractive price into the world of Industrial Ethernet performance for component manufacturers,” states Stefan Schönegger, Manager of B&R's business unit for Open Automation.  
The Cyclone IV features an extremely compact design, up to 25% lower power consumption (compared to its predecessor), and is easy to integrate into the manufacturing process.  
"The combination of POWERLINK and Altera’s Cyclone IV FPGAs provides automation component manufacturers an easy-to-use and cost-optimized real-time Industrial Ethernet solution that is a true alternative to proprietary ASIC-based solutions,” said Michael Samuelian, director of the industrial and automotive business units at Altera. “In addition to POWERLINK running on Terasic’s CIV E Industrial Networking Kit (INK), designers can evaluate and support other Industrial Ethernet standards on a same hardware platform. This multi-standard Ethernet on a common platform approach will help designers lower their total cost of ownership as fewer designs will be required.”