Future fairs at Hanover will alternate annually between production and process automation with next year’s fair being production focused. Beckhoff, which covers a wide range of sectors due to the universally applicable open control technology, will support both segments of the fair with its complete range of products. Another new and positive initiative is the integration of the Interkama fair into the Hanover Fair network. This was agreed by Messe Düsseldorf GmbH and Deutsche Messe AG Hanover, who will jointly act as organizers of Interkama within the framework of the Hanover Fair 2004. Hanover thus confirms its position as the main international automation fair. Beckhoff once again supports the fair with the presence of more than 35 Beckhoff partners and subsidiaries located worldwide.

One of the technological highlights at this year’s Hanover Fair was the new realtime Ethernet solution EtherCAT from Beckhoff. EtherCAT attracted significant interest from visitors, customers and the trade press, but also from the competition. EtherCAT, short for Ethernet for control automation technology, is also the
main topic of the current issue of PC-Control. Managing director Hans Beckhoff regards the EtherCAT project as one of the main milestones in the Beckhoff history, comparable with the introduction of the Bus Terminals in 1995.

As a representative of “New Automation Technology”, Beckhoff demonstrates that “new” automation technology is still possible. EtherCAT brings new impetus to automation in terms of costs and performance. Industrial PCs become simpler, more compact and less expensive - fieldbus cards and additional slots are no longer required. The prototype of this new control generation is the control cabinet PC C6920 . It is equipped with two Ethernet ports and is embedded in a housing that is only slightly bigger than, say, a 600-page book.

Many visitors were very impressed with the EtherCAT performance, e.g. in the form of the Ethernet terminals, yet at the same time they asked themselves: “Do I really need such ultra high speed transfer?” Probably not for standard applications such as building automation – the main advantages here are cost savings and simple installation. However, EtherCAT technology opens up completely new areas of application for automation technology, the so-called “life below 1 ms”. Examples are fast control technology, e.g. drive or hydraulics controls, or fast metrology, e.g. the recording of analog signals with high sampling rates.

Since the fieldbus is no longer the bottleneck within the system, the computing capacity of PC-based controls can be fully utilized. PC control technology, the focus of our company magazine, is also developing further due to the latest processor and memory generation. The article “Software PLC at blazing speeds” on page 24 shows that the link time of the TwinCAT system for 1000 lines of IL code can now be pushed below 1 µs.

Due to the EtherCAT presentation, other product innovations from Beckhoff at the Hanover Fair were somewhat pushed into the background. However, from a technology point of view, the activities in the area of safety technology are just as exciting. The TwinSAFE solution is integrated into the Beckhoff Bus Terminal system and is based on the PROFIsafe technology. Another potentially record-breaking innovation is the 8 channel analog Bus Terminal.Within a standard Bus Terminal housing with a width of only 12 mm, analog input and output signals are arranged in an ultra-compact way. Here too the aim was to become smaller, better, cheaper.

The current issue of PC-Control provides information about a large number of small and large “New Automation Technology” milestones.

Frank Metzner
Manager Marketing Communications
editorial@pc-control.net