TRINAMIC presents the TMC8460, the first EtherCAT slave controller IC to incorporate PWM and Step/Dir I/O peripherals that do not require routing through the firmware of an application CPU, eliminating latency for applications requiring real-time response. It extends the feature set of the core EtherCAT technology with a broad array of peripherals and features: an integrated smart peripherals block accessible from an MCU or EtherCAT master and, in addition to a PWM unit and Step/Dir interface, an SPI master and encoder interface that can be directly mapped to the PDO.
This unique SPI enables latency-free ADC or DAC access. The IC includes a standalone mode that enables direct mapping of integrated peripherals to bus registers, while in parallel an external MCU can perform higher layer protocol operations. TMC8460 communication hardware has been verified as 100% compatible with the existing Beckhoff EtherCAT Slave controller through extensive interoperability testing.
