AUSTIN, TX — The growth of the EtherCAT Technology Group (ETG) continues to rapidly accelerate. In the last 12 months alone, membership in the global Industrial Ethernet group has drastically increased by 250 – an average of one new member every business day.
There are currently 732 companies from 41 countries listed on the ETG membership roster. The geographic distribution of members shows the evolution from a primarily German into a truly global organization. At the end of 2003, 70 percent of the 35 founding members were from Germany. Today the overall percentage of German members is down to just 38 percent. The United States has the second highest percentage of ETG members, followed by Japan, Switzerland and Italy. In Asia, the ETG now has 123 members and most of its regional offices, in Tokyo, Beijing and Seoul. The group is managed from its headquarters in Nuremberg, Germany and in 2007 a North American regional office was established in Austin, Texas.
Like the fast growing membership figures, the number of EtherCAT implementations is rapidly increasing. Today over 550 EtherCAT implementation kits have been sold, including over 150 master stacks. There have also been numerous free-of-charge downloads from open source EtherCAT master Web sites.
A total of 33 vendors have already introduced servo drives with an EtherCAT interface and more are under development. In this respect, EtherCAT has already caught up with the market-leading fieldbus systems of the previous generation.
The performance of the EtherCAT Technology Group is much like the technology itself. EtherCAT has become the performance benchmark for leading industrial technologies and for establishing widespread industry acceptance.
::Design World::
Filed Under: CONNECTIVITY • fieldbuses • networks • gateways, ELECTRONICS • ELECTRICAL