What was the starting point for this innovation? On one hand, there was increasing computing capacity. Thousands of developers continue to work on the optimization of processors. Particularly for the PC, the hunger for more computing capacity and more memory has still not been satisfied. Automation technology greatly benefits from this situation, and the available performance is often higher than actually required. Controllers take on more and more new functions until they finally require the full computing capacity. Luckily, an even faster processor offering a certain amount of reserve capacity is usually available by then.

A further starting point for innovations in control technology is fieldbus technology. In practice, the large number of I/Os can no longer be wired at a single point. The original motivation for the development of the fieldbus was saving of material and manpower for wiring. However, in the early fieldbus days the number of data points was significantly smaller than today and associated cost savings were small. Also, electronic components were more expensive than they are today. Typically, economical fieldbus solutions had 16 or 32 digital channels. If, like in the first applications, 11 sensors had to be connected with the PLC via a 19-wire bus cable, the necessity of a fieldbus was not easy to convey. However, fieldbuses did make sense in a growing number of applications. The technology improved, and the number of data points quickly increased.

10 years ago, a further push of innovation in fieldbus technology opened up new areas of application. At the 1995 Hanover Fair, Beckhoff presented the Bus Terminal for the first time. The fieldbus modules were scaleable for 2 channels. This enabled the total costs for fieldbus applications to be reduced even further. The signal variety and small volume led to optimized, decentralized wiring of sensors and actuators. Users benefited not only from cost savings as the new technology enabled machines and systems to become smaller, voluminous cable ducts were no longer required and, compared with the machine, the terminal boxes housing the Bus Terminals were small. Separate control cabinets and, in some cases, signal distribution hardware were no longer required. Machine or system design took less and less account of control technology, which, in turn, enabled more and more sophisticated concepts for optimizing speed and quality.

The number of sensors and the complexity of sensor technology keeps increasing. In line with these requirements, the Bus Terminal as a "swapped out" PLC periphery card developed more and more over recent years from an electronic terminal block to a modular gateway that maps a wide range of interfaces on the most common fieldbuses. The number of sensor and actuator parameters continues to grow, leading to a further increase in data exchange with terminal devices. Better operability and higher application productivity and quality lead to a requirement for higher transfer bandwidth.

In some current applications, a single fieldbus strand can no longer meet requirements in terms of data throughput and deterministic features. We have realized applications in which 6 fieldbuses had to be connected with a single PC. With EtherCAT, we are able to overcome the fieldbus bottleneck so that future generations of processors will be able to apply their full computing capacity to the application. This means that we – and our customers – have plenty of scope for further innovations, and we hope this will contribute to the further strengthening of our customers’ position in global competition.